Crowdsourcing uses modern technology to quickly gather input from large numbers of people to accomplish difficult, time intensive or distributed tasks.

Hummingbird, a British Columbia company, presented their wildfire detection crowdsourcing concept during the Wildfire Canada 2016 conference. Following up a successful live demo with their system, Hummingbird Network, they also demonstrated their system in January 2017 to Alberta Agriculture and Forestry (AAF) and the BC Wildfire Service. FPInnovations has been asked by both agencies to evaluate the effectiveness of the system as a smoke detection method in an operational environment.