A portable and integrated monitoring device was developed to digitally assess both water levels and surrounding fire-related conditions in forest firefighting water buckets using multi-sensor fusion. The system integrates a hydrostatic liquid-level sensor with temperature–humidity and smoke sensors. Validation was performed through field-oriented experiments conducted under semi-controlled conditions. Water-level measurements were collected over a three-month period under simulated forest conditions and benchmarked against conventional steel-ruler readings. Early-stage fire monitoring experiments were carried out using dry wood and leaf litter under varying wind speeds, wind directions, and representative extreme weather conditions. The device achieved a mean water-level bias of −0.60%, a root-mean-square error of 0.64%, and an overall accuracy of 99.36%. Fire monitoring reached a maximum detection distance of 7.30 m under calm conditions and extended to 16.50 m under strong downwind conditions, with performance decreasing toward crosswind directions. Stable operation was observed during periods of strong winds associated with typhoon events, as well as prolonged high-temperature exposure. The primary novelty of this work lies in the conceptualization of a Collaborative Forest Resource–Hazard Monitoring Architecture. Unlike traditional isolated sensors, our proposed framework utilizes a dual-domain decision-making model that simultaneously assesses water-bucket storage stability and micro-scale fire threats. By implementing a robust ‘sensing–logic–alert’ framework tailored for rugged environments, this study offers a new methodological reference for the intelligent management of forest firefighting resources.

With the advancement of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, its use in ecological monitoring and safety management of national parks has expanded significantly. However, object detection in complex scenes remains challenging due to environmental complexity, background interference, and occlusion. To address these issues, this paper proposes two improved YOLOv8-based models, YOLOv8-StarNet-CGA and SCS-YOLOv8, for detecting pine wilt disease-infected trees, under-construction farmhouses, and forest fires. In YOLOv8-StarNet-CGA, the StarNet module and Content-Guided Attention (CGA) are integrated into the backbone to enhance global feature extraction and focus on critical regions through dynamic weight adjustment. In SCS-YOLOv8, the original CIoU loss is also replaced with SIoU loss to optimize shape and orientation consistency, improving robustness. Experiments on UAV datasets covering diverse national park scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of the models. Results show that the improved models substantially outperform the original YOLOv8 in Precision, Recall, and mAP50. For pine wilt disease caused by the pine wood nematode Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, YOLOv8-StarNet-CGA achieves 8.6% higher Precision and 11.7% higher mAP50, facilitating early diagnosis and intervention of the disease. In under-construction farmhouse scenarios, Precision rises by 11% and mAP50 by 10.1%, lowering annual inspection labor by nearly 30% and improving oversight. For forest fires, SCS-YOLOv8 is more effective, with Precision improved by 7.2% and mAP50 by 6.3%. The improved detection model enables earlier identification of fire spots, thereby providing additional response time for emergency intervention, helping to mitigate fire spread and reduce the loss of forest resources. Both models also reduce GFLOPs and computational complexity, striking a balance between efficiency and accuracy, and showing strong potential for UAV deployment.