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Open Wildfire Sensing Lab

Utah is burning.
Now it's your turn to watch.

Uinta Watch is a community-driven, open-source field lab for low-cost wildfire sensing. Open sensor nodes, reproducible field tests, published data and failures — built by Utahns, for Utah.

A solar-powered mesh sensor on a ridge in Utah canyon country at golden hour

Solar-powered sensor node, Utah canyon country

1.2M
Acres burned

Utah since 2015

$240M
Firefighting costs

2025 season

180+
Structures destroyed

2026 season

3
On-duty firefighter deaths

2026 season

Figures from Deseret News wildfire reporting (Aug 2026), the Utah State Forester, and federal incident reports.

The gap between smoke and response
is measured in hours.

Utah's rural wildlands are vast. Cell towers don't reach every ridge. Satellites pass overhead only a few times a day, can't see through clouds, and miss low-energy smoldering at night — the fires that grow quietly while everything else is blind.

The first person to spot smoke is often a hiker, a rancher, a neighbor. There was no systematic way to get that information into the emergency network fast enough to matter.

Uinta Watch exists to close that gap.

Wildfire smoke column rising over Utah's mountain forest at dusk

The Reality

75% of Utah's wildfires
are human-caused.

Early detection means resources reach the ignition point in minutes, not hours.

The Approach

Solar-powered nodes, mesh-connected, with everything published by default.

Most sensor nodes need no internet — a few gateway nodes bridge the mesh to it. Every design, test result, and failure gets published.

Start Contributing