Artificial intelligence is being deployed in the battle for the prevention and management of forest fires through innovative programs developed and coordinated by the National Observatory of Athens (NOA).
“The aim of Deep Cube is to exploit a very large wealth of satellite data that is available at the moment, free of charge, combined with artificial intelligence technologies to enable us to extract new information from the satellite data,” Yiannis Papoutsis of the Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing (IAASARS) told tate-run news agency amna.
He added that several technologies/applications of Deep Cube include forest fire risk assessment.
so, one more way to deliberately not address a problem, while making sure you look like you’re doing something, and for a bonus, spend some money along the way!
the way the laws are today, there are enormous incentives to destroy forests:
item 1, on the big end of the scale of things: ‘development projects’ which are prohibited in forests, become permissible if the forest is destroyed by a ‘natural disaster’ (a.k.a. fire) and subsequently a large percenatge of the total forested area (now considered ‘reforeseting area’) is allowed for building. Thus the endlessly repeating ‘coincidences’ of forests burning and immediately after, big development projects (usually hotels or wind turbines, these days) popping up on the ashes.
item 2, on the small end of the scale, the owner of any ‘forested’ land, is not allowed to even trim branches from trees, much less cut a tree. Thus the incentive is, to make sure that no tree ever grows in any area that the owner might want to ever be able to use for any other purpose (like farming for example). If people were allowed to actually cut and use wood from trees they own without fearing outlandish (thousands or tens of thousands) fines, people would actually be rushing to plant huge numbers of trees to profit from them later! as it is, they will plow fallow fields just to prevent a seedling tree from sprouting in there and taking root and destroying their ownership rights or exposing them to ruinous penalties!
fix those two things and there will be MORE and HEALTHIER forest in this country very soon.