AI smoke spotter flags 1,036 possible smoke columns near Barcelona in summer trial

An AI system watched for smoke over a natural park near Barcelona this summer. It flagged 1,036 possible smoke columns, and 150 were confirmed as incidents, organisers report.

The results cover 1 July to 17 September 2026 in Collserola Natural Park. The results came out in a press release on 14 October from Mobile World Capital Barcelona, or MWCapital. MWCapital funded the trial. It ran it with the park's managing consortium and the Barcelona Metropolitan Area authority.

The system is called Pantera. It is made by Umgrauemeio, a Brazilian company, and has already been used in the Amazon. The park said in June that cameras were fitted on two of its watchtowers for the test.

Here is how it works. Software studies the camera images and looks for patterns that suggest smoke. It runs a second check before raising an alert. Then a specialist team looks at the image. Only after a person confirms it does the park's team get the warning. On average, it took 3.3 minutes from detection to the alert going out.

One finding stands out. Of the 150 confirmed incidents, 103 were outside the park's boundaries. That is 68.7%. Some were spotted as far as 43.5 kilometres from the watchtower. So the cameras saw well beyond the park itself.

There was a learning curve. At first the system raised many alerts that did not matter. It needed a testing period to adjust to local features such as reflections, city lights and industrial emissions. During that period, these unhelpful alerts fell by 86%, from 207 a week to 30 a week.

Pantera does not replace the people. The park already keeps watch from eight towers in and around the area. Raimon Roda, who runs the park consortium, said Pantera "complements" that system.

Now the caveats. These numbers come from the trial's funder, not an independent study. The release gives no figure for how many fires the system missed. It gives no accuracy rate. And it does not claim that any fire was stopped because of Pantera. In June, the park said the trial would measure things like detection accuracy and false alarms. Only part of that has been published so far.

The trial was a prize. Pantera won the Barcelona Horizon Award, part of the MWCapital Awards, which back new technology tested in real places around Barcelona. Organisers say the results will help judge whether it could grow or be used elsewhere.

The pattern here is an amplifier. AI did not take over the watch. It helped the watch cover a wider area, while people kept the final say on every alert.