A pilot for your Canadian community

OrbiVigil watches for fire starts continuously across Canada from Earth-observation satellites and puts the result in front of municipal, regional-district and Indigenous community staff, in plain language and with its limits written down. The pilot is free, we pre-configure your territory, and one official email address is all it takes to request it.

OrbiVigil is a decision-support tool. Warning the public and committing resources remain exclusively with fire departments, emergency management organizations and the authorities responsible for your community. We replace no official alerting chain, and we never write to your residents or members.

What your community gets

Detection, national fire-danger context, and a dashboard — built on Canadian data

No system to integrate, no software to install, no hardware. Everything runs in a browser, on desktop and on a phone.

On your territory

Your community, pre-configured

We create the watched area around your community's centre before your first sign-in: there is nothing for you to set up.
The radius and name are yours to change, and several areas are possible — reserve lands, hamlets, industrial sites, the wildland-urban interface.
Your community is identified explicitly, never guessed from a similar-looking name.

The core of the pilot

During an event

Detection and email alerts

Continuous detection from polar-orbiting and geostationary satellite thermal sensors over Canada.
An email as soon as an event at level "probable" or above appears in one of your areas, with its distance, time and sources.
One event alerts once per area: the service will not flood the office inbox.

National context

Fire danger and ignition risk, on Canada's own scale

Fire-danger class from the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS), built on Natural Resources Canada's own classified grid — never merged with the European danger scale, so a Canadian rating is never silently rescaled.
Ignition risk combines GOES lightning detection with the CFFDRS danger class. Flashes outside Canadian coverage are flagged as unrated rather than read as calm.
Wind context comes from Environment and Climate Change Canada's HRDPS model at 2.5 km resolution where it reaches an event.

Always

The provenance of every figure

Every event carries its sources, its timestamps and its data licence.
Observed and modelled values never render the same way.
When the satellite cannot see through cloud, the service says so instead of showing "no fire".

What we measure, and what we do not claim

Our published numbers, with their limits

A public body cannot act on an unverifiable promise. Here is the one speed measurement we publish, measured over Canada itself, and exactly what it is worth.

Comparison against Natural Resources Canada's own CWFIS register

+1.08 h · median lead

Across 3,417 matches between our events and the official hotspots of the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS), our first detection precedes CWFIS's own publication by 1.08 hours at the median, at a median match distance of 1.09 km.
The full record is published, losses included: 2,619 wins, 628 losses, 170 ties. We do not publish a chosen average.

Read this honestly. It is a comparison of publication latency between two pipelines drawing on largely the same satellites — not independent ground truth, and it does not say which pipeline is right. CWFIS's own newest hotspot record runs several hours behind its detection, which is part of why our median comes out ahead; that is Natural Resources Canada's publication cadence, not a claim about whose detection is better. What we are offering is precisely to measure this on your own territory, during the pilot.

We measure and report where we are wrong: the lead-time scoreboard and spread-forecast accuracy, with under- and over-prediction reported separately.

Level 3 is human

The automatic chain stops at level 2, "probable". No automation declares a fire "confirmed" — only a named analyst can.
An alert you receive is therefore a detection to verify, not a finding.

What we cannot see, and what is still in progress

Thermal sensors detect heat: a young fire under dense boreal canopy or under cloud may be seen late, or not at all.
Useful resolution is a few hundred metres: OrbiVigil will not spot a vehicle fire or a small burn pile.
Fuel typing over Canada is built from Natural Resources Canada's own CFFDRS fuel-type grid, not a European analogue — but lightning-based ignition risk currently rates flashes only, not every fuel type or terrain condition, so treat it as one input among several, not a verdict.

Who this is for

Municipalities, regional districts, and Indigenous communities and First Nations

Wildfire risk in Canada does not stop at a municipal boundary. The pilot is open to any local government or Indigenous community responsible for a populated area or reserve land: cities and towns, regional districts and counties, and First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities and their emergency-management or lands departments.

We do not claim consultation, translation into Indigenous languages, or any relationship with a nation beyond what this pilot actually is: a monitoring tool your own staff configure and read. If your community has data-sovereignty requirements we should know about before you sign up, tell us in the form below — we would rather hear it up front than after your account exists.

The pilot

What it includes, what it costs, what happens at the end

Free, no commitment

€0 · trial period

No card, no purchase order, no procurement process to try it.
An account at the "Municipal government" role, signed in by a secure emailed link — no password to manage.
Several staff can be equipped; just tell us who.

At the end

Nothing is lost

If the pilot is not renewed, the account becomes a free account: email alerts stop, the live map stays available.
Nothing is deleted — the account, your watched areas and the history stay in place. Renewing reactivates them rather than rebuilding them.
You are told before the end date, and the days remaining are shown in the dashboard.

Your data

The minimum

We keep: the community name, a contact, an official email address, your watched areas.
We ask for no resident or member personal data and no access to your systems.

Request a pilot

One official email address is enough

We reply within two working days. Every request is reviewed by a person: this form creates no account and opens no access automatically.

What happens next: 1. we check the request really comes from the community; 2. we create the account at the municipal role and configure your territory; 3. you receive a welcome email with your activation link, the pilot duration and the name of your contact. Steps 1 and 2 take up to two working days.

Prefer to write? use the contact form. Representing a fire department, emergency management organization or provincial/territorial agency? The Pricing page describes the institutional offer.

Building a procurement file? The Trust & data practices page covers where data lives, what personal data is processed, and our sub-processors.