Towards Develo** a Peatland Fire Prevention System for Brunei Darussalam

Abstract

Peatland forest fire has been occurring in Belait over the Badas dome. Human activities around this area have been the main contributor. This has affected the ecosystem that leads to the degradation of the peatland forest in Brunei. These degraded areas have become prone to fire with the right conditions. To date, there are no forest fire detection devices or monitoring system installed in Brunei. This paper presents a prototype which aims to prevent peatland fire from happening. We developed this prototype using a development microcontroller board called Arduino with two types of sensors. Before we developed this prototype, we studied the requirements from the two main stakeholders of peatland forest fire: the fire fighters and the peatland experts. Taking this knowledge into account, we opted to come up with a peatland fire prevention mechanism where we artificially keep fire prone peatland areas wet during prolonged dry climate in order to reduce risk of forest fires. To facilitate this, we designed a facility consisting of two dams. In particular we use sensors that will trigger the dam valve to release water from the dam and re-wet the land when our system identifies the soil humidity level under a certain threshold value. We refer to our solution as Brunei Peatland Fire Prevention (BPFP) system. Being aware of the fact that the dams in our BPFP system could spill out during wet seasons, our system considers an automatic draining mechanism from the dams. In this paper, we demonstrate how BPFP system works. We presents the algorithms that contributes in the making of BPFP system a stable, efficient and real-time peatland fire prevention system, Additionally, in this paper, we provide a brief discussion on the major issues that would further contribute in improving our BPFP system.