WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

If you're in the middle of fire season, battling active blazes, the last thing you want is false alarms.

AI is helping detect wildfires in the West. It's a powerful tool, but humans still have to do the work of actually fighting and preventing those fires.

This is here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

Today, Here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, we've got another installment of our environmental series reverse course.

It also happens to be NPR's Climate Solutions Week, and the theme was local lessons.

So we looked for stories close to home.

I drove south from Chicago to Illinois

farm country for a glimpse at how solar farms and agriculture are sharing the land, like sheep

grazing under solar panels. They like eating grass. As long as they got good, clean grass in front of

them, they don't matter to them where they're at. Also, Peter O'Dowd made a whistle-stop tour of three states in the West to find out how

fire agencies are using artificial intelligence to detect wildfires. But can AI-equipped cameras

tell the difference between smoke and a cloud of dust? In the early days, there were some funny

occasions where we detected what we thought

was smoke, but it was actually a snowblower. We're going to hear those stories in a few minutes.

But first, Peter, I was surprised to hear just how widespread this practice of AI wildfire detection

is. You've done a lot of stories on wildfire. Did you ever think AI would be part of the story?

No, you know, I probably should have. I mean, AI is part of basically everything we do these days,

but I was working on a story months ago, months ago about birds landing on power lines. And I just had

a random conversation with the person at the utility who's like,

oh, you know what else we have on power lines is AI equipped cameras? And I was like, what?

That's really interesting. And it turns out that utilities and state forest agencies and all

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