Approximately 5 billion dollars in US revenue is allocated annually to the USDA Forest Service (USFS) for ~ 30,000 employees, 10,000 of whom are firefighters responsible for fire management on about 193 million acres according to the web sites >http://www.fs.fed.us/aboutus/budget/2013/fy2013-overview.pdf< and >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forest_Service<. Considerable additional funding is allocated by the Government to NASA for space observation, and to local and State Forestry Agencies as grants to support, monitor and control wildland fires outside of the USFS jurisdiction. Additional State, county and local funds are provided for non-federal land protection. Detection of open area fires is typically performed by manned observatories, random reporting and aerial surveillance. Past and current autonomous approaches to long range forest fire detection and reporting are presented. Optical IR flame detectors have been previously developed. These typically experience a high number of false alarms and low flame detection sensitivity due to interference from solar and other causes and omission of collection optics. A combination of IR detectors has recently been used in a two or three color mode to reduce false alarms from solar, or background sources. A combination of ultra-violet C (UVC) and near infra- red (NIR) detectors has also been developed for flame discrimination. Relatively solar-blind basic detectors are available but can typically only detect a meter square flame zone up to about 30 meters. We discuss the range and solar issues for IR and visible detectors and qualitatively define UV sensor requirements in terms of the mode of operation, collection area issues and flame signal output by combustion photochemistry. Innovative flame signal collection optics for multiple wavelengths using UV and IR as low false alarm detection of wildland fires at long range (8-10 km/ for a one meter square fire) in daylight (or darkness) have been developed. A circular array detector and UV-IR reflective and refractive devices including cylindrical or toroidal lens elements for the IR have been described. The dispersion in a refractive cylindrical IR lens characterizes the fire and allows a stationary line or circle generator to locate the direction and different flame IR "colors" from a wide field of view. A line generator will produce spots along the line corresponding to the fire which can be discriminated with a linear detector (Engelhaupt et al. 2005 10). We demonstrate prototype autonomous sensors with electronic radio frequency digital reporting from various sites. Based on these results, we conclude that technological advancements make surveillance, detection and reporting of wildfires over large areas reliable and economically feasible.