Scalable drone infrastructure for revegetation
The ADSC team is using revegetation time-series data to inform the potential development of new features and tools to support organisations and citizen scientists involved in land rehabilitation and environmental management activities.
An estimated 66% of Victoria's native vegetation has been removed as a result of land clearance and development over the last 200 years. Loss of native vegetation across much of south-eastern Australia is correlated with a range of negative outcomes for native flora and fauna. Organisations such as Catchment Management Authorities (CMAs), Landcare, Greening Australia, Indigenous organisations and private landholders are all involved in a range of revegetation and restoration activities in an attempt to restore landscapes. Many of these organisations are considering remote sensing via drone as an innovative way to monitor the successes of this work at scale.
Drone mapping of small to medium sized areas is becoming increasingly simple, with improvements in automation, flight duration, and quality assessment. However, cost, and specialised knowledge in survey techniques remain barriers to the post processing of data collected by drones into actionable information. The ASDC wishes to simplify the process through the provision of data pipelines and tools which will allow drone data to be processed, analysed, visualised, and shared with ease.
The ASDC team hopes that the scalable hardware, data pipelines, and tools being built within the platform will give research and surveying groups a simple and easy way to track the growth, mortality rates, habitat value, and structural features of revegetated areas through time.
Whilst the platform is still in the development phase, drone data collected over a revegetated gully in South Gippsland has been put through the platform to test a range of platform capabilities and features. These include processing capacity, accuracy assessment, and ease of use.
Standardised data capture was initiated in 2016 and repeated in 2019, and 2022. Processed products clearly show the progression of growth. An automated tool in development will quantify the growth by subtracting the elevation values in the digital surface model (DSM) and calculating the remaining volume.
The ASDC team’s ultimate goal is a system capable of parsing data collected from hundreds of revegetation sites across Australia through a simple, quick, and affordable process to produce actionable intelligence for stakeholders.
Results from these surveys have been used to inform new features and tools for the measurement of change over time and opportunities for the simplification of the user interface for citizen scientists.
If you would like to get involved and help guide the development of the ASDC platform in a way that will benefit you, contact our team.
Revegetation time-series
A transition between three orthomosaics captured in 2016, 2019, and 2022 of a patch of revegetation in South Gippsland Victoria.
