GroundWorx

Emerging fire intelligence

Fire intelligence for deep forest.

An emerging 35-element sensing network designed for deep forest — monitoring soil and fuel conditions below the canopy and air quality, smoke, flame and atmospheric conditions above the forest floor. The iQ Fire Station SmartTower remains separate from Guardian SmartTower’s floodplain/fire focus and Environmental SmartTower’s open-area golf and agriculture role. Prototype under development; detection performance requires validation.

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iQ Fire Station SmartTower sensing network across a forested landscape
Under Development

The iQ Fire Station SmartTower is a 35-element SmartTower currently under active development and engineering. Sensing capabilities, form factor, and availability timeline are subject to refinement as the product moves toward release.

What you are up against

  • Wildfire detection happens too late — after smoke is visible from a distance, the fire is already established.
  • Existing detection depends on human patrols or satellite passes with long gaps between readings.
  • Wildland-urban interface zones need always-on sensing, not seasonal coverage.

What changes

Detection
Continuous 35-element sensing — smoke, flame, particulates, thermal imaging, and atmospheric readings — catches fire signatures in the minutes that matter.
Fuel moisture
In-ground soil moisture and temperature readings track fuel conditions in real time, not from a weekly index.
Resilience
Meshed mission-critical communications over satellite, LTE, LoRaWAN, and 900 MHz keep reporting when other networks go down.

Who this is for

Built for the people responsible for the first hour.

Fire districts & agencies

Continuous ground-level sensing in the canyons and drainages crews already worry about, reporting before smoke is visible from a lookout.

Timberland & land owners

Fuel-moisture and atmospheric conditions across large, remote acreage without sending anyone out to read a station.

Utilities & rights-of-way

Monitoring along corridors and substations where ignition risk carries liability and shutoff decisions need evidence.

WUI municipalities & counties

Always-on coverage across the wildland-urban interface, meshed so a single failure does not blind a neighborhood.

Typical deployment

What gets deployed

  • iQ Fire Station SmartTower — 35-element SmartTower spokes (under development)
  • Dispersed Starlink Super Station hubs for satellite backhaul across WUI zones and timberlands (under development)
  • Air quality, smoke, flame, particulate, thermal imaging, and atmospheric sensing above ground
  • In-ground fuel-moisture sensing + multi-mode comms (direct satellite, Band 25 LTE, 900 MHz mesh, LoRaWAN)

The 35-element iQ Fire Station SmartTower prototype separates air quality, smoke, flame, atmospheric conditions and 10-hour fuel moisture from its four in-ground readings: soil temperature, VWC, EC and dielectric.

iQ Fire Station SmartTower sensor lineup

Reference

The cost of fire, by country

Published estimates of property loss, lives lost and land burned. Figures come from the agencies and reports named on each card and cover the period shown.

Annual estimate

Worldwide

~180,000 deaths a year from burns

  • • Most occur in low- and middle-income countries
  • • Burns are a leading cause of injury-related disability
Source: World Health Organization

Third-party estimates shown for reference; they are not GroundWorx measurements.

Prototype specification · Under development

35 elements. Designed for deep forest.

Designed for deep forest, where dense canopy, forest-floor fuel conditions and remote communications shape the sensing network. It remains the dedicated forest-fire prototype, separate from Guardian SmartTower and Environmental SmartTower.

The planned iQ Fire Station combines air-quality, atmospheric, fuel, site, and in-ground data points for GAIN’s mission-critical autonomous alerting. This is a development specification, not a deployed fire-detection guarantee.

Air quality (14)

  1. Carbon monoxide (CO)
  2. Carbon dioxide (CO₂)
  3. Volatile organic compounds
  4. Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂)
  5. Ozone (O₃)
  6. Particulate matter PM1.0
  7. Particulate matter PM2.5
  8. Particulate matter PM10
  9. Optical smoke obscuration
  10. Photoelectric smoke response
  11. Ultraviolet flame response
  12. Infrared flame response
  13. Thermal imaging
  14. Visible / low-light imaging

Atmospheric (12)

  1. Air temperature
  2. Relative humidity
  3. Wind speed
  4. Wind gust
  5. Wind direction
  6. Solar radiation
  7. Precipitation rate
  8. Precipitation accumulation
  9. Barometric pressure
  10. Lightning strike count
  11. Lightning distance
  12. Ambient light

ET & motion (2)

  1. Evapotranspiration (ET)
  2. Accelerometers

Fuel & site (3)

  1. 10-hour fuel moisture
  2. GPS location
  3. Compass heading

In-ground (4)

  1. Temperature
  2. Volumetric water content (VWC)
  3. Electrical conductivity (EC)
  4. Dielectric

Floodplains & fire-exposed areas

Prototype · Under Development

Guardian SmartTower

Flood and fire. One dedicated focus.

Designed for floodplains and fire-exposed areas, where changing water conditions and fire risk need to be considered together. Guardian SmartTower is a dedicated flood-and-fire prototype, not a replacement for either of the other towers.

Floodplain awareness

Development is focused on flood-warning support: understanding changing ground and water conditions in flood-prone terrain. Site-specific warning thresholds and detection performance require field validation.

Fire-risk awareness

A complementary fire focus for the same landscape, where dry conditions and flood exposure can occur at different times. Deep-forest deployments remain the role of the iQ Fire Station SmartTower.

Discuss a Guardian SmartTower trial

8 ft. prototype · 5 m soil-array length · marked bury line. Specifications supplied by GroundWorx; subject to change. Not a deployed flood/fire detection guarantee or a substitute for official emergency warnings.

Guardian SmartTower prototype with original branding, bury line and connected soil probe
Guardian SmartTower concept artwork

Prototype specification · Under development

33 data points. Flood and fire awareness.

Air quality & detection (14)

  1. Carbon monoxide (CO)
  2. Carbon dioxide (CO2)
  3. Volatile organic compounds
  4. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2)
  5. Ozone (O3)
  6. Particulate matter PM1.0
  7. Particulate matter PM2.5
  8. Particulate matter PM10
  9. Optical smoke obscuration
  10. Photoelectric smoke response
  11. Ultraviolet flame response
  12. Infrared flame response
  13. Thermal imaging
  14. Visible / low-light imaging

Atmospheric (12)

  1. Air temperature
  2. Relative humidity
  3. Wind speed
  4. Wind gust
  5. Wind direction
  6. Solar radiation
  7. Precipitation rate
  8. Precipitation accumulation
  9. Barometric pressure
  10. Lightning strike count
  11. Lightning distance
  12. Ambient light

ET, motion & location (3)

  1. Evapotranspiration (ET)
  2. Accelerometers
  3. GPS location

In-ground (4)

  1. Temperature
  2. Volumetric water content (VWC)
  3. Electrical conductivity (EC)
  4. Dielectric

Planned communications & power

Satellite · Autonomous LTE wireless · LoRaWAN 900 MHz · Meshed network

228 Ah lithium · No solar required · Mission-critical autonomous alerts through GAIN

Three towers. Three deployment settings.

Guardian SmartTower
Guardian SmartTower prototype tower with connected soil probe
Floodplains · Fire-exposed areas
Designed for floodplains and fire-exposed areas, where changing water conditions and fire risk need to be considered together. Guardian SmartTower is a dedicated flood-and-fire prototype, not a replacement for either of the other towers.
iQ Environmental SmartTower
iQ Environmental SmartTower prototype tower with two in-ground arrays
Open areas · Golf courses · Agriculture · Vineyards
Designed for open areas such as golf courses, agricultural fields and vineyards, connecting air, weather and root-zone conditions to day-to-day land management. It is distinct from Guardian SmartTower’s flood-and-fire focus and Fire Station’s deep-forest role.
iQ Fire Station SmartTower
iQ Fire Station SmartTower prototype tower with two in-ground arrays
Deep forest
Designed for deep forest, where dense canopy, forest-floor fuel conditions and remote communications shape the sensing network. It remains the dedicated forest-fire prototype, separate from Guardian SmartTower and Environmental SmartTower.

Network architecture

Under Development

Hub and spoke, engineered for the worst day.

Wildfire takes out power and cell towers first. The iQ Fire Station SmartTower roadmap answers that with a mission-critical resilience architecture: dispersed Starlink Super Stations as satellite hubs, and 35-element sensing towers as the spokes that mesh into them. Both the Super Stations and the full mesh topology are part of the emerging development roadmap, not a shipping product today.

The Hubs

Dispersed Starlink Super Stations

High-bandwidth, high-survivability satellite backhaul stations, strategically dispersed across wildland-urban interface zones, timberlands, and forest perimeters. Each hub carries the traffic of every tower meshed to it, so there is no single point of failure when regional grid power or terrestrial cell towers go down during an active wildfire event.

  • Placed deliberately across WUI zones, timberland, and forest perimeters — coverage designed around the terrain, not the nearest tower.
  • Satellite backhaul independent of the regional grid and of terrestrial carrier infrastructure.
  • Redundant hubs mean the loss of any one station reroutes rather than blinds the network.
The Spokes

iQ Fire Station SmartTowers

35-element sensing edge towers deployed throughout the terrain, meshing directly into the nearest Starlink Super Station. Each tower is built with Band 25 canopy-penetrating spectrum, selected specifically for dense forest and heavy foliage, and carries multi-mode communications so a reading always has a path out.

  • Band 25 LTE spectrum chosen for canopy and foliage penetration where higher bands fall apart.
  • Multi-mode comms: direct satellite capability, Band 25 LTE, 900 MHz long-range mesh, and LoRaWAN.
  • Continuous telemetry — thermal imaging, flame, smoke, air quality, atmospheric conditions, and in-ground fuel moisture.
  • Keeps reporting through total terrestrial network blackout by meshing to a hub or going direct to satellite.

01 · Edge

35-element towers sense the forest floor and the air above it, every cycle, in every season.

02 · Mesh

Towers relay to each other over 900 MHz and LoRaWAN, so a tower without a clear path uses a neighbor's.

03 · Hub

The mesh terminates at the nearest Starlink Super Station for satellite backhaul.

04 · GAIN

Readings land in GAIN, where fuel-moisture, thermal, and air-quality signatures trigger autonomous alerts.

Sensing edge → 900 MHz / LoRaWAN mesh → Starlink Super Station → GAIN

Open API

No walled gardens. Your data goes wherever you need it.

GAIN is built as an open, bidirectional platform. Root-zone telemetry streams out to any system you run, and context streams back in — irrigation run times, agronomic events, imagery, weather — so every prediction is made with the full picture. You own your data, and you can move it.

Bidirectional by design

Read every reading, prediction, and recommendation out. Write irrigation events, maintenance activity, and third-party observations back in.

Integrates at will

REST endpoints, webhooks, scoped API keys, and scheduled exports. If a platform speaks HTTP, GroundWorx can speak to it.

Your data, portable

Raw and derived telemetry are exportable at any time, in open formats, to your own warehouse. No lock-in, no gatekeeping, no export fee.

Early access

Talk to our team about the iQ Fire Station SmartTower.

Tell us about the terrain you are responsible for and we will share where the iQ Fire Station SmartTower stands in development, what it will sense, and how early deployments will be selected.

Two fields is all we need. We reply within one business day and use your details only to respond to this request.

For existing product or account service issues, email service@getgroundworx.com.