Advanced Approaches to Wildfire Detection, Monitoring and Surveillance—2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Wildfires continue to pose significant threats to ecosystems, human safety, infrastructure, and property, especially under the increasingly adverse effects of climate change. The first edition of this Special Issue successfully gathered innovative research on early wildfire detection, remote sensing, surveillance systems, and post-fire analysis—contributing valuable insights into how artificial intelligence and integrated monitoring and surveillance systems can mitigate wildfire damage. Building upon this foundation, the second edition aims to showcase the rapid evolution and broadening of methodologies in wildfire detection and monitoring. Significant progress has been made across various domains, including sophisticated deep learning models—such as SwinTransformer, YOLO variants, and attention-based neural networks—that offer improved accuracy, robustness, and real-time deployment capabilities. This edition aims to emphasize new advances and innovative systems for fire suppression and risk assessment.

This second edition seeks to extend prior research by including recent developments. We welcome original research articles, reviews, and case studies that address, but are not limited to, the following:

• Advanced wildfire detection and monitoring systems in inaccessible and urban–wildland interface areas.
• State-of-the-art detection models and hybrid architectures that improve fire and smoke detection accuracy, especially under challenging conditions like fog, haze, and complex backgrounds.
• Integration of remote sensing, video analysis, IoT, and augmented reality for wildfire surveillance.
• Focused development of lightweight neural networks and knowledge distillation techniques for resource-constrained devices for real-time processing using drones, IoT sensors, and embedded systems, facilitating real-time response in remote or inaccessible environments.
• Data augmentation strategies for enhancing model generalization and robustness to diverse environmental conditions.
• Fire classification methods, including multi-label scene understanding, fire class recognition, and models capturing correlated features for comprehensive fire scenario analysis.
• Enhanced remote sensing identification of burned areas, their temporal dynamics, and spectral indicators—building upon previous results and developing more accurate, real-time monitoring tools.
• Fire detection and monitoring in open-space areas, such as disposal sites, garbage dumps, warehouses, marinas, dry-land marinas, harbors, parking places, etc.
• Wildfire detection and monitoring via satellite and aerial remote sensing systems.
• Integration of wildfire monitoring and surveillance with advanced ICT systems, such as GIS technologies, meteorological data visualization, wildfire risk estimation, wildfire spread simulation, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR).

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Damir Krstinic
Prof. Dr. Darko Stipanicev
Dr. Giovanni Laneve
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Fire is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• wildfire detection
• fire detection
• smoke detection
• flame detection
• wildfire monitoring
• wildfire surveillance
• remote sensing
• wildfire detection validation and testing
• burned-area monitoring
• burned-area analysis
• wildfire risk estimation
• wildfire spread simulation
• virtual reality (VR)
• augmented reality (AR)

• Advanced Approaches to Wildfire Detection, Monitoring and Surveillance in Fire (12 articles)