The wildfires in California in early 2025 caused massive devastation. By the end of February, the state’s government reported 443 fires had burned over 57,650 acres. In addition to land resources and homes, the flames took with them many businesses that had operated inside the larger Los Angeles region.
While residents and business owners there are still picking up the pieces from the disaster, others across the country are left wondering if the same could happen to them. Closer to home, could something like that happen in Indiana?
“The short answer is ‘Yes,’” said Songlin Fei, director of the Purdue Institute for Digital Forestry. “Fire is a combustion. Do you have the fuel? Do you have the conditions, like severe drought and high temperatures? We don’t lack any of that here. If the time is right, if the condition is right, there will be fire.”
Fei said the current forest composition in Indiana is what experts in the industry call a central hardwood forest, mainly composed of oak and hickory. These species are fire-dependent, meaning they need controlled fire to prevent out-of-control wildfires by eliminating vegetation and regenerating the forest ecosystem. An example, he noted, is at the Hoosier National Forest where crews are working with prescribed fires to recover and regenerate oaks. “Fire is both your friend and your enemy. Fire is part of the ecosystem, but human dominance in this landscape allows us to suppress the fire,” he said.
In the western part of the state, however, where the landscape is largely prairie and forest interface, areas are more fire-prone. But Fei is quick to note that even the least-suspecting areas could experience wildfires.
“Who would think that Canada would have these large-scale wildfires? The environment is wetter compared to here, but it happened,” he said. “If a city or community is built into a fire-prone area, and it is not well-managed in terms of vegetation, then cities will be in danger.”
Fei noted a large-scale wildfire in Indiana would be devastating to the timber supply, where the hardwood industry is such a dominating sector of the economy.
“It’s a huge sector of the economy. A nice black walnut tree can be worth several thousand dollars,” he said. “If fire goes through, it’s going to touch some of these very valuable hardwoods that support a significant sector of the economy here.”
High-tech Mitigation
At the Institute for Digital Foresty, Fei and his colleagues are taking proactive measures to mitigate fire risks before they become disasters for residents and business owners. Using digital technology, including drones and satellites, the team can study land and forest composition to determine what areas might be higher risk and more susceptible to wildfires.
“We now have the remote sensing technologies for large-scale mapping and studies. This Lidar data can be acquired in about an hour and uses lasers to scan the surface of the earth. We can detect how much debris is there, and we can look at the trunks of the trees and the canopy of the forest,” he said.
Fei said this data is crucial in determining fire risk because it helps officials learn, ahead of time, where certain hazards may be lurking. For example, surface fires occur when leaves and grass on the ground catch fire. If these fires cannot escape to other materials, such as shrubs and fallen timber, the debris will burn and not spread. However, once the fire jumps, and becomes a canopy fire, which causes a more intense, increasingly dangerous scenario that can result in widespread damage and loss.
This information can be beneficial to landowners and city and county officials in fire-prevention land management, now on a national level, he said. The institute’s AI model is trained to identify the exact location of all vegetation in a city and can be fed into a computer model that simulates various levels of wind and heat distribution to determine how prone to fire the area is. This data can help officials take action to minimize the chance of wildfires.
Fei said the institute is hopeful to form partnerships in the near future with insurance companies to develop requirements using maps that locate buildings and vegetation. The tools are also advantageous in the utility sector, Fei said. The data can be passed to utility companies to produce maps and information that facilitate managing potential hazards from utility lines and trees.
Post-Disaster Response
The Purdue Institute for Digital Forestry is also active in developing technological-based strategies to assist in rapid response measures during active wildfires and after they occur. Fei said the research team is using artificial intelligence to spot fire outbreaks, which can expedite communication and coordination among response teams. The technology is also beneficial in the immediate post-wildfire stage for assessment and relief efforts.
“There are all these tools out there for utility or insurance or other infrastructure companies,” he said. “We need to take advantage of these tools to proactively manage fire risk and make us less susceptible to it.”
