9/25/2025 Cassandra Smith
Written by Cassandra Smith
Wildfires in the United States ravage millions of acres annually, displacing communities, damaging infrastructure, and creating severe air quality issues across entire regions. In recent years, longer fire seasons have led to increasingly intense and unpredictable blazes, putting lives, ecosystems and billions of dollars of property at risk. But help is on the way. Through two separate projects, researchers at The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are developing advanced technology to stop the spread of wildfires—or even prevent them entirely.
Computer science assistant professor Elahe Soltanaghai is leading a multidisciplinary team on one project, which received $2 million from NASA’s FireSense Technology program to develop a canopy-penetrating radar and tag system that will be mounted on an unmanned aircraft system (UAS).
Other participating Illinois faculty include Mohamad Alipour (a research assistant professor of civil & environmental engineering) and Girish Chowdhary (an associate professor of electrical & computer engineering, agricultural & biological engineering, and computer science). Outside participants include Dr. Karen An of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Prof. Gabriel Rebeiz of UC San Diego, and Dr. Adam Watts of the U.S. Forest Service.
“The challenge is too big for any single discipline to solve. By bringing together experts from different fields, we can build a system that bridges the gap between advanced technology and real-world wildfire management,” said Soltanaghai.
The system will sense understory fuels—such as biomass quantity and dryness—to better assess wildfire risk and predict potential spread. It will work by deploying drones that drop battery-free backscatter “tags,” which Soltanaghai describes as “a QR code for the forest.” These tags will act as ground reflectors for the radar, enabling it to “see” through the clutter of the forest’s canopy and estimate the biomass conditions below.
The planned combination of drone surveillance, radar sensing and satellite imagery could revolutionize wildfire monitoring and response efforts by informing them with unprecedented kinds of data.
While Soltanaghai’s project in SSCDS is focusing on hardware and sensing systems to measure understory fuels, a team led by Paolo Gardoni in the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) is taking a software-driven approach. This second project’s goal is to improve wildfire planning, response, and containment through use of predictive modeling.
The team in CIRI has developed a prediction model that analyzes topography, vegetation, wind direction and speed, and other inputs. The model can identify at-risk buildings and infrastructure, helping decision-makers create fire mitigation plans before fires ignite. In near real-time, responders could also use the tool to predict wildfire spread and guide interventions.
When tested against historical wildfire data, the model demonstrated exceptional accuracy in predicting fire behavior.
“These testing results offer confidence that the tool – once delivered to the field – will significantly improve the planning and response to future wildfires and reduce their destructive impact,” said Gardoni, who is the Alfredo H.-S. Ang Family Professor and an Excellence Faculty Scholar in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The two projects’ technologies should complement each other: the Soltanaghai project’s system will generate higher-quality inputs by measuring fuel quantity and dryness under the canopy, while the tool created by Gardoni’s project will leverage those inputs to model wildfire spread and inform fire mitigation strategies. Together, the projects’ findings should contribute to the protection of both communities and natural resources in the years ahead.
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Elahe Soltanaghai is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.