Soooo, essentially WiFi enabled smoke detectors on trees? Yeah sounds like a simple, solid idea
Not a bad idea considering most fires do start near civilization which is where this iot strategy by far will have the highest density. Seems a little tricky to filter out false alarms from controlled fires though. For deep forest monitoring its hard to imagine a better strategy than high flying drones with thermal cameras.
I could see LoRa radio nodes making deep-forest IoT sensors possible. Have a solar station with starlink provide internet access, then use it as a LoRa (or other packet radio) modem for a couple-mile radius of sensors. Each sensor package could be a fairly cheap box with sensor, solar power and a radio. Would be super easy to deploy hundreds of those, all served by the same completely autonomous satellite station, and cheap to replace failing hardware (just see which nodes stop talking and send replacements when a bunch fail).
