Utah wildfire camera network supports management efforts, U research

A lightning strike on a patch of grass, choked dry by drought, can spark a fire in an instant and destroy hundreds of acres in minutes. Along the Wasatch Front, it’s likely someone would notice such a blaze and report it, but in rural Utah, wildfires often go unnoticed before they spiral out of control.

A team at the Utah Education Network (UEN) and University of Utah is hoping to change that.

In September, UEN partnered with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands (FFSL), the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), and the Utah Communications Authority (UCA) via a Fuels Management and Community Fire Assistance Program grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) to build a wildfire monitoring network across Utah. UEN’s goal is to enhance wildfire detection, management, modeling, and safeguards through rapid response and research using live video feeds and artificial intelligence (AI).

In Utah, remote fire monitoring cameras are scarce, though government agencies, utilities, and private organizations are working to test and deploy more, said Joe Breen, a senior IT architect for the U’s Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and a principal investigator for the Utah Wildfire Camera Network project.

“Our BLM colleagues told us when wildfire crews came to Utah last year to support the Monroe Canyon Fire and the France Canyon Fire that they didn’t have as much visibility as surrounding states due to the lack of cameras,” said Jeff Egly, associate director for research support and strategic partnerships for UEN and a principal investigator for the project.

In 2025, Utah experienced 1,146 wildfires that burned 164,707 acres, according to fire news service Daily Dispatch, which pulled data from the Utah Fire Information dashboard. Those fires cost about $191.8 million to fight, a FFSL report estimated.

UEN plans to install as many as 40 cameras in the coming years in rural, hard-to-reach areas where federal, state, and local agencies and first responders lack visibility, Egly said.

“On the Wasatch Front, the BLM often receives numerous reports about a fire, but out in the far reaches, it can take a while for someone to report a fire. So, these cameras will really quicken the response time,” Egly said.

They’re working with ALERTWest, a company that partners with public and private organizations like universities, first responders, utilities, and land stewards to create a network of cameras that feed into its “situational awareness platform,” which is powered by an AI engine that monitors the cameras 24/7. When a fire signature is detected, someone from ALERTWest verifies whether it’s valid, and if necessary, begins notifications to the appropriate agencies. Those agencies and first responders will have access to the cameras, including the ability to control and maneuver them.

As of March 1, UEN had installed and brought online a test camera at Frisco Peak, west of Milford in Beaver County, where it provides network support for a U Department of Physics & Astronomy telescope. UEN will install a second camera at the Lynn communications site in the northwest corner of the state, which the BLM identified as a priority wildfire camera site, after the network is ready.

UEN, which provides network access to Utah’s public K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and many public libraries and rural health care providers, is partnering with UCA, which provides mountaintop communications access for state government, to set up the microwave network for the cameras. Microwave networks use radio frequencies between antennas to transfer data to a core network. UEN will install and maintain the cameras and troubleshoot issues with the network.

The cameras and associated parts and equipment will use the same design as the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), including infrared technology and thermal imaging.

“We’re basing our camera network on what our counterparts have learned over the years,” Egly said. “It maintains consistency for the BLM, which seems to like this model and the visibility it gets.”

Additionally, within the past 45 days, UDOT has integrated hundreds of its traffic cameras into the ALERTWest system. The cameras are fixed, so they cannot be maneuvered, but anyone can view the feeds, and the monitoring and notification processes work the same.

“Utah was a doughnut hole on the western map prior to adding UDOT cameras. Now, traffic cameras are providing visibility — a real benefit to first responders,” Egly said.

In the future, Egly said, UEN may add motorized wildfire cameras to key UDOT camera locations, including corridors where UDOT has a vested interest, such as Interstate 15 south of Cedar City where fires have crossed the interstate, forcing UDOT to close it.

Research

CHPC will collect and store the data from the cameras and make it available to researchers from the U of U and Utah State University (USU), the state’s agricultural school and a CHPC customer, as well as U of U and ALERTWest partner institutions like UNR, Nevada Seismological Laboratory, University of California San Diego, and University of Oregon, which already provide their data to U researchers.

“Our fire scientists rely on some of those repositories to do their research, but we’d like to do the same research here in Utah since our state has slightly different geography,” Breen said. “Also, fires don’t care about state borders, they just want to burn things, so we need to be able to watch them and capture that data when they move into Utah.”

Breen will set up an environment to collect the data and build a dashboard based on faculty input that displays the data in different ways. He also plans to discuss with faculty additional ways that they can leverage the project, like launching more sensors to measure particulate matter or gather other metadata. He believes the data will benefit myriad research areas and disciplines, such as fire science, atmospheric science, computer science, meteorology, and AI.

Breen and Egly expect researchers will be interested in:

• Fire behavior: rate of spread, fire intensity, spotting events
• Extreme fires: plume dynamics, wind shifts, fire whirls, fire-induced thunderstorms
• Community and infrastructure protection: structure ignition patterns, ember-driven spread, defensible space effectiveness
• Suppression and resource optimization: retardant effectiveness, fire line holding probability, backburn outcomes
• Climate and long-term risk signals: fire season shifts, increasing nighttime burning, intensity trends

With that information, researchers can improve forecasts and models, tactical decisions, building codes, resilience design, and resource deployment and allocation.

At least two U projects, including the URSA Lab and Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy, have some focus around wildfire, Egly said. “So, I’m anxious to see where and how this data can assist their current efforts.”

Additionally, this project will benefit WildWEST, a National Science Foundation project that Breen and Egly are working on, by providing information on what it takes to implement power and network connectivity to support field work in the wild.

Egly said UEN hopes to continue supporting the effort to build and improve Utah’s wildfire camera network like other institutions and western states have. The only difference he anticipates is working with the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, a new DOI unit intended to unify and streamline wildland fire management efforts that had been spread across multiple agencies, instead of the BLM. That change, he said, may influence the location of cameras.

Still, he said, any additional cameras will help agencies and first responders have better visibility and, in some cases, be able to triangulate on a fire, while supporting research. He thinks 90-100 cameras, like Nevada has, should do it.

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