Detect fire
before there is fire.
FireWatch smells a smouldering fire — its carbon monoxide, its hydrogen — minutes before flames become visible. Open sensor mesh, AI verification, autonomous drones.
Pre-launch
Be there when the forests get eyes and noses
- Early access to the public demo
- One email at launch — no spam
- A look at the dashboard, docs & open data
The forest is burning faster every year
These four figures describe consequences. On causes: 45 % of German wildfires trace back to people — and nobody knows the cause of 43 %.
Responsibility starts before the first spark →A smouldering fire is measurable before it is visible
Cameras and satellites only spot the smoke — often too late at night, in fog or under a dense canopy. The chemical signature of a smouldering fire (CO, H₂, VOC) is in the air minutes earlier, right at the forest floor. That is exactly where FireWatch measures.
From a tree in the forest to an alarm on a screen
Five steps between the first smouldering gas and the alert at the fire station.
Sense
Solar sensor nodes on trees measure combustion gases (CO, H₂, VOC), temperature and humidity around the clock.
Mesh
Readings hop through a self-healing LoRa mesh — and over MQTT from the gateway — to the cloud. No mobile network or power lines required.
Detect
The FireWatch cloud scores the risk from the raw values and classifies each node: ok → elevated → warning → alarm.
Verify
On an alarm, an autonomous drone launches to the node and confirms the fire with an onboard vision + thermal AI — killing false alarms. (Next stage: simulated today, the mesh works without it.)
Alert
Once verified, an alert with the exact location and a thermal snapshot goes out to fire services within seconds.
Makers & open source
Build your own node: open hardware, open firmware, a documented API.
Research & municipalities
Open raw data and a live picture — CC-BY snapshots, filter API, EFFIS integration.
Anyone protecting forests
Join the list, sponsor a sensor later or bring FireWatch to your region.
Own woodland? Prevention is funded.
Many don’t know that German states and the federal government fund wildfire prevention. We show who can apply for what — with the official contact points per state.
Open hardware, open data, accountable
Every node sends its raw readings — no black-box sensor, no vendor lock-in cloud. Here is what one telegram looks like:
{
"node_id": "fw-node-00A7",
"co_ppm": 41.8, "h2_ppm": 14.2, "voc_index": 213,
"temperature": 28.4, "humidity": 31,
"solar_charging": true, "battery_v": 4.02,
"rssi": -94, "hops": 3
}
Our real demo nodes, right now
No screenshot, no mockup: these nodes sit in the Leipzig floodplain forest and actually transmit — environmental sensors, a soil sensor and the gateway that bundles it all onto the network. The values come live from the same open API anyone can query; the trend line shows the latest readings.
A radio node with no sensors of its own — it bundles the sensors' raw readings and relays them to the network. Its steady heartbeat is the proof: the chain is up.
Heartbeat · every ~5 min
The same data, raw and unfiltered: GET /api/v1/nodes ↗
Dig deeper
Real-time data, open sources — on their own pages, so this one stays short.
Fire-danger map
The official EFFIS danger map of Europe, live from Copernicus data.
EU situation
Figures and trend of the fire season — what Europe has lost this year.
Live from orbit
Daily NASA imagery of Europe’s current wildfire regions.
Latest news
What is burning now — curated headlines from the fire season.
Fire archive
Every fire this year with NASA imagery, place and date.
Pre-launch
Be there when the forests get eyes and noses
Join the list and be the first to know when the open demo, the live dashboard and the docs/API go live.