First demo mesh goes live in the Leipzig floodplain forest
Our first real nodes hang in the Leipzig floodplain forest (Auenwald) — no mockup, no screenshot. A handful of solar-powered sensor nodes and one gateway that bundles the raw readings and passes them on to the network. Exactly the open mesh FireWatch is built for.
The mesh forms itself: the sensor nodes transmit their values to the gateway, whose steady heartbeat shows the chain is up. The readings — gas, temperature, humidity — land live in the same open API anyone can query.
The biggest lesson was about placement, not electronics: airflow under the canopy matters enormously for how quickly gases reach a node. Exactly these lessons go into the open deployment playbook, so other regions can stand up their own mesh faster.
Funding for wildfire prevention: what forest owners can apply for
Many forest owners don't know that wildfire prevention is state-funded. We gathered the programmes across all 16 German states — and the honest route to funding early detection.
Releasing our first open dataset
Anonymised gas, temperature and humidity time series from the demo mesh in the Leipzig floodplain forest — free to use for research and agencies.