BurnSense measures the wildland fuel around every structure in your municipality — scored and mapped, so your fire services know where to look first. Built for small municipalities. No consultants, no GIS staff, no capital project.
Canada's standard wildfire fuel maps were designed around the boreal forest: the spruce and jack pine country of the national fire behaviour system. Nova Scotia isn't boreal. The Acadian forest is a different thing entirely: red spruce and hemlock, maple and birch, mixed stands that the national fuel categories were never designed to describe. Applied here, the standard 30-metre national product blurs exactly the distinctions that matter most for measuring fuel around homes.
So BurnSense doesn't use it. Our fuel classification is a machine-learning model trained on Nova Scotia's own provincial forest inventory and multi-season satellite imagery, at 10-metre resolution — fine enough to see individual properties. Tested against held-out provincial inventory, it materially outperforms the national baseline across Acadian forest types. We'll happily walk any municipality through the methodology and the validation numbers.
Every structure gets two numbers.
How much wildland fuel (forest, canopy, conifer) presses up against it.
How the slope around it works for or against that fuel.
Fuel exposure and terrain context combine into one priority zone for every property, so limited vegetation-management resources go to the right areas first.
Same method for every property. Whole municipality. Refreshed every year.
Small municipalities are asked for more evidence every year: what you have, what threatens it, why your priorities are the right ones. Yet the tools built to help all assume you have a GIS department and someone with spare time to run the software. Most small municipalities have neither, and no budget line that will ever change that.
BurnSense is built the other way round: it does the mapping and measurement work that was out of reach, so the people you do have can spend their time on the parts that need a person. Nothing to install, nothing to configure, nobody new to recruit. It arrives working:
A map your fire chief can open tonight.
Priority zones your council can point to when residents ask.
Committee-ready reports for the binder.
For regions: one consistent picture across every member municipality — the whole county on one map, not five studies in five binders.
Provincial and federal programmes are currently funding municipalities to do exactly this work: regional hazard and vulnerability analysis, FireSmart programme enhancement, wildfire mitigation planning. But these grants are competitive, and the capacity it takes to write a strong application is the capacity small communities don't have.
Every wildfire funding programme asks for the same three things: your exposure, your priorities, and why this project over another. Assembling that from scratch takes hours your team doesn't have. BurnSense makes the case for you — your exposure maps, priority zones, and summaries are export-ready, built to drop straight into an application, including for programmes like the provincial Emergency Services Provider Fund.
BurnSense is a screening measurement, not a fire forecast.
It does not predict where fires will start or how they will behave. It gives a fast, consistent picture of fuel exposure across an entire municipality, so limited vegetation-management and assessment resources can be pointed at the right areas first. It complements professional assessment; it does not replace it.
We build in the open with the municipalities we serve, and subscribers get new modules as part of the subscription. Two are in active development:
Nova Scotia's new Support for Fire Protection Services Act asks municipalities to keep proper records of fire service equipment and training. For volunteer departments, that usually means someone's evenings and a spreadsheet nobody trusts. We're building the easy way in: photograph the gear (the label, the certificate, the invoice) and the system drafts the record; a person confirms it before anything is saved. The county gets one dashboard: every department's inventory, standardised, with expiring certifications and upcoming inspections visible in one place. In prototype now, shaped with input from Nova Scotia fire services.
We're building an assistant that watches the provincial and federal programmes relevant to your community, flags the ones you're eligible for, and drafts a first version of the application from your own BurnSense data. You review, correct, and submit. It does the paperwork; you keep the judgment. In development, and included in the subscription when it ships.
A walkthrough takes fifteen minutes, on a call or in person.
Request a walkthrough