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SPEED LiDAR surveys in forests can require hours or even days, gathering data below and below the tree canopy. The Elios 3 cut this process to just 10 minutes in a single plot. |
DATA No decisions about a section of forest can be made without these LiDAR scans. The Elios 3 provides the required data quickly and with a high degree of accuracy, streamlining operations. |
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ACCESS Where a traditional survey used to require hours of walking through the trees and even manual measurements, the Elios 3 offers quick, easy access with minimal effort. |
SAFETY Using the Elios 3 reduces time spent in the forest and eliminates any climbing tasks. This cuts work at height and exposure to trips or branches falling, keeping teams safe without having gaps in the data. |
The forestry sector of New Zealand is one of the country’s major industries, representing almost 7% of exports and valued at NZD 5.8 billion in 2024. This lucrative industry balances careful future-proofed planning with natural hazards to ensure the growth of healthy, strong trees and the processing of wood products.
Forest management itself calls for a painstaking process of monitoring hundreds, if not thousands, of trees of different ages and sizes at a time. The value of each tree is determined by its health and condition before logging. To determine this value, forestry management companies will measure the trunk of each tree to find its circumference as well as the height of the canopy. This allows them to estimate the tree’s monetary value once felled.
LiDAR scans of trees provide critical insights into the health and size of the trees - and whether they can be felled
To measure the tree height, canopy, and trunk circumference used to be a long and arduous task requiring days of work for a single section of forest and, depending on the available equipment, work at height. New methods are slowly making this a less labor-intensive process, including handheld laser scanners that can be transported around a growth plot by a person. This still takes several hours per plot but is faster and safer than traditional methods. However, specialized drones - specifically the Elios 3 - are offering a new way to do this that cuts hours of work down to minutes.
Interpine Innovation is a paper and forest manufacturing company based in Rotorua. Their work in forest consulting and data management calls for accurate information about their forests to optimize the value of every hectare. They make decisions related to forestry based on cutting-edge data collection techniques, including satellite image analysis, multispectral imagery, AI tools, and now, remote laser scanning.
In a project shared with Scion research, they used a handheld LiDAR system to scan a section of forest. They were able to successfully capture the 2 needed measurements: trunk thickness and overall height. This method does still require a person to walk around the plot for hours to get complete data coverage and considering there are hundreds of hectares under management, this is still a time-consuming process.
Interpine Innovation invited Flyability to their site to test the Elios 3 to see if a LiDAR-equipped drone could offer the right data faster than handheld scanning.
The Elios 3 drone is designed to fly in challenging and often confined spaces. When tested at the Interpine site, the Elios 3 pilot found that the drone was well-suited to the challenge at hand. This is due to several key features of the Elios 3:
Representatives from Flyability, Interpine Innovation, and Scion Research met on-site in a section of Interpine’s forestry management environment to put the Elios 3 to the test. Despite a windy day with wind moving at 6 meters per second, the Flyability pilot was able to take off and control the drone in preparation to scan the forest.
Equipped with the drone’s powerful Rev 7 LiDAR, part of the Surveying Payload, the pilot flew down avenues of trees to first capture LiDAR scans of the tree trunks. Next, the pilot did careful flights above the canopy level to capture data on the tree height as well.
The flights took just 10 minutes in total, with 5 minutes for the flight below the canopy and 5 minutes above. The detail shown on the drone’s remote controller, with the LiveMap, was exactly what the Interpine and Scion teams wanted. Both were impressed with the scans and speed of the Elios 3.
Next, they wanted to test how the drone would cope in a denser forest. The group moved to a secondary site and challenged the pilot to scan trees that were more closely packed. Despite the weather and obstructions from tree branches, the pilot was able to fly through the suggested area and capture the relevant data. When reviewing it, they could trim the point cloud to show specific rows and lines of trees, which could then be easily measured and assessed.
Despite this being a test mission, the Elios 3 provided exactly the desired results in 10 minutes, demonstrating that not only could it capture the required data, but it was possible to do so in a fraction of the time a handheld scanner would require.
Overall, Interpine Innovations and Scion Research were very impressed with the results from the Elios 3. They saw that multiple hours of walking around the site could be cut down to just a few minutes, meaning more time could be spent on analysis and additional mapping compared to a labor-intensive manual scanning system.
The Elios 3 saved time and effort for the Interpine team, covering a huge space very quickly, and helped show a new way to optimize forestry management. It’s an exciting and new use case for the Elios 3, and although the drone would not be an appropriate option in extreme weather, it highlights the value that this confined space drone can bring to complex outdoor missions as well!
Discover more about the Elios 3 drone and its LiDAR payload!