Science Has Good and Bad News for the Future of Wildfires

A National Science Foundation-funded project, NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network), is working on using LiDAR (Light Identification Detection and Ranging) technology to get hyper-accurate maps of vegetation layers that determine how fires will burn. 

LiDAR scans allow several advantages over traditional methods of surveying and mapping land. Instead of a single pulse of energy returning, as happens in sonar, LiDAR collects information from pulse returns at various wavelengths, which can provide a more nuanced and layered image of a plot of land.

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