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The Nature Conservancy Tests 'Revolutionary' New Technology to Protect Native Forests

New technology may revolutionize
natural resource management in Hawai'i 

HONOLULU, HAWAI'I — July 29, 2008 — The Nature Conservancy last week began testing a new remote sensing technology on Kaua‘i that it believes will revolutionize natural resource management in Hawai‘i.

“I honestly think this could be the biggest technological breakthrough for weed management and monitoring in Hawai‘i, or anywhere else, in the last decade,” said Trae Menard, the Nature Conservancy's Kaua‘i program manager.

Under a contract with The Nature Conservancy, the remote sensing firm Resource Mapping Hawai‘i has developed a collection of imaging technologies that will let conservation officials sit at computer screens and recognize the major weeds on their properties.

The system uses both natural light and multi-spectral imaging, and can be set up to highlight, for instance, Australian tree fern, miconia or strawberry guava plants in a remote forested area. All three are serious invasive species in Hawai‘i.

The system can map thousands of acres on a clear day and create images so detailed that individual leaves on trees can be identified. It has a three-dimensional (3D) capability that allows the heights of individual plants to be calculated, combined with multispectral sensing that allows a computer to search the images for specific kinds of plants. And it can do it all for just a few dollars per acre over large areas.

“Amazing stuff. Definitely a huge breakthrough,” said Dr. Kenneth Kaneshiro, director of the University of Hawaii's Center for Conservation Research & Training.

“There is little doubt that the high resolution imagery will revolutionize the way to practice conservation in the future. Once the imagery of a region is available, much of the strategic conservation planning can be done using cyber tools...rather than having to spend days hiking and surveying topographically and environmentally challenging regions,” he said.

Dana Slaymaker of Resource Mapping Hawai‘i developed the technology for The Nature Conservancy. Tomorrow afternoon his firm will be present the new technology at the Hawai‘i Conservation Conference, and will also have a vendor booth.

Slaymaker and Resource Mapping Hawai‘i pilot Jimmy Ray Hoffert spent last week bolting the new technology into Hoffert's Cessna 182 single-engine plane at Līhu‘e Airport on Kaua‘i. Three highly specialized cameras peer through an FAA-approved hole in the plane's belly.

Once low-level clouds clear, the plane flies at about 2,000 feet above ground level with the three cameras firing simultaneously. One is a multispectral high-definitional digital video camera that collects imagery in green, red and infrared wavelengths. A particular kind of plant will typically give off light in a specific pattern, which a computer can recognize. Thus, when a researcher plugs in the characteristics of a koa tree, the computer can use the imagery to locate all the koa trees in the landscape.

The other two cameras are extremely high definition digital models with 210 mm lenses, which shoot in natural color. The cameras have 6,660 pixels across their sensors, and when flying at about 2,000 feet, each pixel covers a space 2.2 centimeters square—less than an inch square, Slaymaker said. That level of detail means the shape of individual trees can be identified, and on trees with large leaves, even individual leaves can be recognized.

Pilot Jimmy Ray Hoffert peers through array of cameras. © Grady Timmons/TNC

According to Slaymaker, the high resolution was a requirement of Menard, who wants to be able to identify the places where such weeds as Australian tree fern and weedy albizia trees are found. “We can now give them the location of virtually every Australian tree fern on their property. This would not have been possible in this detail as little as two years ago” Slaymaker said.

Menard said another goal is to send up periodic survey flights, so that the Conservancy can track the changes in the landscape over time. It would allow researchers to identify the success of its eradication efforts, to track new areas of alien species invasion, and to recognize other changes in the landscape, like damage from feral pigs. It will even allow them to identify new problem weeds, then use their multispectral signatures to and go back to old images and recognize when and how they invaded the landscape. Even the impacts of large-scale climate changes can be tracked.

Using the technology “it will be possible to see patterns of change in the watershed ecosystem even at the microhabitat level, which may be correlated to things like global climate change or El Nino/La Nina events,” Kaneshiro said.

A significant bonus of the technology is that it is compatible with a number of other mapping tools. It can, for instance, be used as an overlay on existing U.S. Geological Survey digital mapping, so that the hills and valleys of the land's natural contours are shown. It can also be used in Geographical Information System (GIS) applications.

Dana Slaymaker installs cameras in plane. Photo © Grady Timmons/TNC

“There's a lot of interest. We're already getting phone calls and emails about it,” he said.

The technology will remain permanently installed in the Resource Mapping Hawai‘i project's Cessna, so it will be available to fly missions whenever there is clear weather. Hoffert said the aircraft can readily fly anywhere in the state for mapping missions.

The Nature Conservancy, using private funds as well as State of Hawai‘i and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service money, has allocated $400,000 for a pilot project to map 80,000 acres of Kaua‘i forested land that the Conservancy oversees as coordinator of the Kaua‘i Watershed Alliance. The Conservancy directly manages about 7,000 acres deep in the heart of the upper Wainiha Valley and on the Alaka‘i Plateau.
 

Photos and video b-roll available to media on request.

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.