Only AI can prevent forest fires with Allison Wolff from Vibrant Planet
Mar 26, 2024
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Allison Wolff, CEO of Vibrant Planet, discusses how wildfires play a positive role in land management. She emphasizes the need for adaptive planning to combat the intensifying wildfires and the importance of AI in monitoring and planning. They also touch on working with indigenous groups, the benefits of nature-based climate solutions, and the significance of incorporating traditional land management practices.
Proper land management can create the environment for lower, slower burning fires that forests need.
Collaboration with indigenous groups is crucial for learning effective land management practices.
Deep dives
Importance of Managing Wildfires
Wildfires have a positive impact when they burn low and slow, managing land by clearing undergrowth and feeding the soil. However, current wildfires are more severe due to factors like overplanting, invasive insects, and climate change, making them harder to contain.
Vibert Planet: Urgent Technology for Wildfire Resilience
Vibert Planet is a science and technology platform focused on creating a common operating picture for wildfire and nature resilience. By modernizing slow planning processes and incorporating machine learning, they aim to address urgent wildfire management challenges.
Collaborative Approach to Land Management
Vibert Planet's platform caters to land managers, fire chiefs, and counties, offering a data-driven system to enhance multi-jurisdictional planning. By facilitating collaboration among stakeholders and enabling real-time scenario planning, the platform aims to optimize land management decisions.
Addressing Environmental Challenges with Technology
Vibert Planet's system recommends treatments like thinning forests and prescribed fires to mitigate severe wildfire behavior caused by human interventions. By emphasizing collaborative decision-making, monitoring environmental resources, and predicting outcomes, the platform contributes to sustainable land management and resilience planning.
Every wildfire season seems to be getting more intense than the last but today’s guest is here to tell us that wildfires actually have a good side. Today on Found, we’re joined by Allison Wolff, the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management. Wolff discusses why the wildfires we’re seeing today are hotter and spreading more quickly than we can contain and how proper land management can help create the environment needed for the lower, slower burning fires forrest need.
They also talked about:
How Wolff’s previous experience working with leaders at tech giants like Facebook and Netflix helped shape her leadership style
The importance of working with indigenous groups to learn how people have been managing the land for centuries
The key role AI places when it comes to monitoring land management and creating adaptive planning
(0:00) Introduction
(2:07) Vibrant Planet is modernizing land management
(11:31) Adapting land management to climate change
(16:45) Scaling nature-based climate solutions
(20:16) The benefits of a for profit company
(30:00) The importance of Indigenous knowledge in land management