Set Up Monitored Areas & Sub-Areas Yourself

What are Monitored Areas and Sub-Areas?

In OroraTech’s Wildfire Solution (WFS), you can define custom Monitored Areas for wildfire monitoring.

• A Monitored Area is your main zone for tracking fire activity. It determines where detections are filtered and alerts are sent. They are defined by a name, geographic extent and notification delivery methods.
  
  
  
• A Sub-Area is a smaller property or asset (e.g., county, plantation, forest, conservation unit) inside a Monitored Area. It allows you to identify fires down to specific sites and shows up in notifications and the Incident Overview.
  
  
  
• An example of a Monitored Area with Sub Area properties: Here we have Greece as a Monitored Area, covering the whole country as one area.
  
• But the area has Sub-Area properties showing the 13 territories of Greece.
  

📌 Users belonging to the same Organization can view and share Monitored Areas.

Example of Incident Overview:

Here the value of Sub Area properties is visible. Beside the Area Name "Greece" the specific region is shown right away, e.g. "CRETE PEPYD".

Example of Email Notification:

Again, the title states in which Monitored Area the activity was detected, and further the sub-area region is given under "Location".

Upload Monitored Areas Yourself (DIY)

You can easily upload your Monitored Areas and Sub-Areas in the platform:

1. Open WFS and go to the Monitored Area menu.


2. Click Add Area and choose one of two options

3. Option 1: Add manually

• You can add an area by drawing a polygon on the map by clicking on "Draw" or by clicking on the editing symbol on the right and inserting a WKT string
  
• Draw an area with your Mouse and finish it by double clicking. This will create a WKT-string: POLYGON((11.96715012031132....)). This can be edited and any WKT-String can be inserted.
  
• In addition you have to give the area a Name and set Notification methods (more to Notifications on the end of the article). 
  
  

4. Option 2: Upload or Update a file (recommended for most cases)

1. Import: Browse and for your file(s) and insert them
   

1. • Accepted File Formats and requirements:
     • .geojson or .shp, .prj, .dbf (Shapefile)
     • Coordinate system (CRS): EPSG 4326 for .geojson. For shapefile it can be any CRS.
     • Sub-Areas can be included as properties/columns in the same file
     • Sub-Area properties will not display special characters like mutated vowels (ê, ã, é, ñ, æ, ø)
     • Max size: 100MB per Monitored Area (Uploading  large Monitored
       Areas and/or buffering them via the platform can take a very long time!). Tip: Shapefiles are smaller in file size than GeoJSON files.
     • Valid polygons only (no nulls or broken geometries)
     • Max 2,000 sub-areas per Monitored Area (above that may incur added costs)
     • without special characters like mutated vowel (ê, ã, é, ñ )
2. Preview: In step 2 you will see a preview of your area. In this example we have the country Greece as a shapefile including it's 13 regions as sub-area properties. 
   
   There are two options: Either keep all 13 regions as one Monitored Area by enabling "Dissolve into single monitored area" and giving a name to the area. This gives you the option to add a buffer to the area.
   If you would like to update an existing monitored area, give it the exact name and the area will be updated, keeping notification methods unchanged. 
   
   
   
   Or do not dissolve into single monitored areas and instead upload all sub-regions as individual monitored areas 
   
   
   📌 If you are an Admin or Owner user, there will be a checkmark which will let you to share the are within the organisation.
3. Sub-Area Names: After giving an area name and buffering the area (this can take some time),  choose the property/column of your file that represents the sub-area prrperties. In this case column "f_admin" holds the region names. 
   
   
   
4. Additional Properties: Choose additional properties (in this case id codes of regions) to be added. 
   
   
   
5. Notifications:
   In the final step you can choose the notification methods for your monitored area(s). If you see some Notification methods greyed out like Whatsapp and Telegram in the image below, please ask your Customer Success contact or support@ororatech.com to activate the notification methods for you. You can also skip the Notification settings and do it later but we recommend to set it right away. 
   
   
   
   For every notification method you can choose Advanced Notification Criteria.  
   
   • Choose whether you want to receive notifications about detections from Geostationary Satellites (GEOs). The difference between GEO and LEO (Low Earth Orbit) Satellites is explained here. We recommend Initial.
   • For Minimum Confidence we generally recommend 0.2. Read more about Cluster Confidence.
   • Read this article for detailed information about setting notifications and look at our FAQ page about questions you might encounter with notifications. 

Don't forget that you can contact support@ororatech.com anytime. We are here to help!