SYDNEY—In October, a sensor mounted on a 28-foot pole in the Australian countryside detected small particles in the air near a timber plantation and sent out an alert.

When plantation staff arrived, they found a small man-made fire that was already under control, but the incident offered a glimpse of how authorities hope to use new technology to battle wildfires that have grown increasingly intense in recent years.

Other regions, including the western U.S. and even in frosty Siberia, have experienced particularly intense fire seasons recently, stretching global firefighting resources and making early detection of fires more crucial. Fires left unchecked can create their own weather systems, raining embers down on nearby communities and pushing dangerous smoke into big cities and to neighboring countries.

The sensor that picked up the October fire near the timber plantation is one of more than 40 in a network that covers an area nearly double the size of New York City in Australia’s Victoria state. The solar-powered, cylinder-shaped sensors are packed with instruments including optical and thermal cameras, flame detectors, particle counters for air quality, and ground-vibration readers. The data are publicly available online in real-time.

(Attentis sensors being assembled at a factory in Melbourne, Australia.)

Attentis Pty. Ltd., a Melbourne, Australia-based company, finished installing the network in early 2019 as a pilot project to demonstrate the technology. They didn’t get much use detecting fires last season because the blazes were too far away.

Cameron McKenna, managing director at the company, said he is in talks to install similar sensor networks to improve fire detection capabilities in other parts of the country. “We use multiple methods of detection as opposed to a single method,” he said.

(‘We use multiple methods of detection as opposed to a single method,’ said Attentis Managing Director Cameron McKenna.)

In Canberra, Australia’s capital, researchers are working with a local firefighting agency to install video cameras on four fire towers. One tower will also have a thermal camera installed.

A computer program will scan images from the thermal camera to detect fires, and a person will monitor the other video feeds. Researchers plan to develop a computer program to automatically scan the video feeds too, said Marta Yebra, director of the Australian National University Bushfire Initiative. The idea is to determine whether the cameras detect new fires more quickly than the old-fashioned way of a person in a fire tower, she said.

Rohan Scott, who leads the rural fire service in the Canberra area, said people in towers on average spot fires within seven minutes of ignition. But the towers are staffed only on high-risk days.

“If we can get detection 24/7 but at the same speed as a human-manned fire tower, then I think that would be a good outcome,” he said. “Anything quicker than that would be a definite bonus.”

(A worker installs an Attentis sensor at a botanical garden in Victoria state in early 2019, part of a network that could help monitor for new wildfires.)

Other ideas involve using drones fitted with lasers to create detailed maps so authorities know which areas have more dry vegetation and present a higher fire risk. One recent effort involved researchers poring over satellite imagery in an attempt to build a model for detecting extreme fire behavior from orbit. They found that changes in smoke colors could help predict fire behavior, according to the Minderoo Foundation, a nonprofit that sponsored the research.

One company, Fireball.International Pty. Ltd., says its machine-learning method can detect smoke from ground-based cameras and fires from heat signatures on thermal-satellite images. Its system is already being used by a big power company in California, and Fireball plans to begin pilot programs in Australia this fire season, executives said.

(A fire tower near Canberra that will be getting a camera system as part of a study to determine whether technology can detect new fires more quickly than human observers.)

A prototype of the system detected smoke from fires within 15 minutes of ignition, while averaging less than one false positive a day per camera, according to an analysis published in a peer-reviewed journal in January. It said there is room for improvement.

“People are beginning to realize, ‘Gosh, we really can detect a fire in the first five minutes,’” said Tim Ball, an academic and co-founder of the company who is also a former firefighter.

Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com

Appeared in the December 15, 2020, print edition as ‘Australia Wages High-Tech War on Fires.’

This article was originally posted on The Wall Street Journal.