As the planet warms due to human-caused climate change, fire damage has increased with it. Forest area burned by wildfires increased 320% from 1996 to 2021, according to National Integrated Drought Information System.
While building technology to slow the progress and effects of climate change would be ideal, it is a huge, expensive problem that affects every industry and needs adaptive responses in the near future. Vibrant Planet appears to be one of those solutions. The startup digitizes land mapping and uses artificial intelligence to help its users — fire departments and government offices — better manage land and also better prepare for potential climate events like wildfires.
Vibrant Planet founder and CEO Allison Wolff said recently The TechCrunch podcast found that despite how essential proper land management is to food security, human safety and the protection of biodiversity and natural resources, the industry is still largely stuck to paper maps that are not always accurate. This analog approach makes it very difficult to reproduce certain climate disasters or events and plan for them.
Wolff said Vibrant Planet, sold as an annual subscription, solves that problem by bringing everything online and using AI to make it easier and faster for its users to see how potential disasters and events might play out.
“We’ve basically put together this very powerful cloud-based, data-driven system to allow this to happen in real time,” Wolff said. “[It’s] very collaborative with spatially overlapping designs’.
Bringing mapping online also allows organizations to collaborate on land management solutions that work for everyone. Indigenous tribes can share their knowledge of how their ancestors cared for an area or land, conservationists can explain which species on a plot of land need to be protected, and fire chiefs can talk about fire danger.
The system also allows these groups to test different treatments for the land — such as controlled fires or removing certain trees or vegetation — to see how it will affect the resilience of the land, so they can find a plan that works best for all parties involved. .
Wolff never thought she’d become a startup founder, but she told Found that the issues Vibrant Planet wants to solve were too big for her to ignore.
“Vibrant Planet is a science and technology platform that creates what we call a common operating picture for fire resilience and nature resilience,” said Wolff. “We take the term ‘joint operational picture’ from the military and from firefighting. And that’s what it sounds like, it means urgency. They are critical, coordinated decisions. And we’re using it in the area of natural resource management and wildfire resilience, because we have to, it’s very urgent.”
