Wildfire fuel in your community. Measured.
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 geographic information system (GIS) staff, no capital project.
Imagery: Esri World Imagery. Demo scene is synthetic; no real properties are shown.
Built for Atlantic Canada's forest.
Imagery © Esri, Maxar · structures illustrativeCanada'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 red spruce and hemlock, maple and birch, mixed stands that the national fuel categories were never designed to describe. Applied here, the national 30-metre map blurs exactly the distinctions that matter when you measure 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.
Every structure gets two readings, kept separate.
Fuel Exposure and Terrain Context answer different questions, so BurnSense reports them side by side and never blends them into one number. Here they are for one structure from the demonstration scene.
Fuel Exposure
Dense conifer in all three FireSmart zones, right up to the home.
How much wildland fuel surrounds the structure, and how close it comes.
Terrain Context
Nearly flat ground, facing north-west.
How the slope and aspect around the structure work for or against that fuel.
Same method for every property. Whole municipality. Refreshed every year.
Zones group properties. They aren't a third score.
BurnSense groups nearby buildings into wildland-urban interface (WUI) zones: the neighbourhoods where homes meet the forest. Zones aren't drawn by hand. They come from the buildings themselves. Structures close enough to share the same stretch of forest are gathered into one zone, and a zone ends where the houses thin out or the forest does. Clusters of only a few buildings are shown separately, so one isolated home never sets the priority for a neighbourhood.
Each zone then gets a single priority band, summarising the fuel, terrain and layout of everything inside it, so a fire service or council can plan vegetation work street by street instead of one property at a time.
Zones can be reshaped to fit how you work. If your fire districts, civic areas or subdivision names are the units your council already plans by, we draw the zones to match them. The scoring doesn't change: the same method runs on your boundaries, so every zone stays comparable with every other one in the municipality.
A zone doesn't replace either reading. Open any structure inside it and its own Fuel Exposure and Terrain Context are still there.
Built for the team you actually have.
Small municipalities are asked for more evidence every year: what you have, what's exposed, why your priorities are the right ones. The tools built to help assume a GIS department and someone with time to run the software. Most small municipalities have neither.
BurnSense does the mapping and measurement work that was out of reach, so the people you have can spend their time on the parts that need a person. Nothing to install, nothing to configure. 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.
A printable page per property for residents and volunteers.
For regions: one consistent picture across every member municipality. The whole county on one map, not five studies in five binders.
The funding already exists.
Provincial and federal programmes are funding municipalities to do exactly this work: regional wildfire assessments, FireSmart programme enhancement, wildfire mitigation planning. But the grants are competitive, and the capacity it takes to write a strong application is the capacity small communities don't have.
Your exposure
Every structure measured the same way, mapped across the whole municipality.
Your priorities
Zones that show where vegetation work does the most good first.
Your case
Maps and summaries ready to drop into an application, including for programmes like the provincial Emergency Services Provider Fund.
BurnSense is a screening measurement, not a fire forecast.
It doesn't tell you where a fire will start or how it will behave. It gives a fast, consistent picture of fuel exposure across an entire municipality, so limited vegetation-management and assessment resources go to the right areas first. It complements professional assessment; it doesn't replace it.
See your municipality on the map.
A walkthrough takes fifteen minutes, on a call or in person.
Request a walkthrough