Tasmania's AI-Enabled Fire Camera Network Detects 550+ Fires in a Single Season

Sustainable Timber Tasmania, the state's forestry manager, partnered with the Tasmania Fire Service and Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service to deploy an AI-enabled camera network — built by Hobart-based Indicium Dynamics — on existing fire-lookout towers across the state. The 360-degree cameras scan continuously for smoke, with a typical detection range of 20–30 kilometres and record daytime and night-time detections as far as 78 and 130 kilometres respectively.

In the 2024/25 fire season the network detected more than 550 fires across Tasmania and referred 123 of them directly to fire management agencies. In one documented case, a camera spotted smoke near St Marys on the state's east coast at 8:30am in early December 2024 — while crews were already fighting fires that had destroyed 19 homes at nearby Dolphin Sands — and a helicopter dispatched on the alert extinguished the new fire within two hours.

In November 2025 Sustainable Timber Tasmania received a AU$1.4 million federal grant to build the Tasmanian Integrated Fire Camera Network, doubling the state's remote camera coverage with next-generation cameras and drones. Reporting does not yet include an independent audit of false-positive rates or a counterfactual estimate of damage avoided, so the causal link between detections and reduced burnt area is not separately quantified.

Read the full analysis: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-12/remote-fire-detection-ai-cameras-tasmania/106209074