Tree Count Application

In our latest seminar with Esri South Africa. Senior Remote Sensing Specialist Nyasha Mureriwa discusses the application of Swift Geospatial’s Tree Count Management Solution.

Swift Geospatial has been specialising the applications of remote sensing in the forestry industry providing clients with a forestry monitoring solution that assists forestry clients monitor the growth, health and activities occurring in their forests, such as harvesting.

Over the years, however, we have been frequently asked if there is a way to keep track of trees that have been planted over time and if it is possible to identify stress in individual trees. It was this level of feedback and these types of questions that prompted the Swift Geospatial team to look more closely into the use of high-resolution satellite imagery in order to provide these answers.

As a Geospatial organisation, we focus our efforts on how best to integrate different technologies. Those that have already been developed, those in development and those that are just ideas. This is how we aim to answer the questions our clients have.

After running various tests, we found success in the marriage between Harris’ ENVI Crop Science Module and Esri’s ArcGIS Pro. With these technologies Swift Geospatial is able to provide clients with a variety of solutions such as:

• the count of their trees from a very young age right up to the point of canopy closure;
• the relative health of the counted individual trees;
• the location of each counted tree;
• gap analysis of the planted trees to help identify misplanting or missing trees;
• tree-crown radius.

We provide these answers via several easy to use dashboards, web maps and web applications that are customisable to the clients’ priorities. One does not need to be GIS and Remote-Sensing savvy to draw information from this application to make decisions.

With the Swift Geospatial Tree Count Management Solution coupled with the Forestry Monitoring Solution you will be able to monitor your forests like never before. Allowing you to make faster, more informed decisions.

As any Farmer or Forester will tell you, conditions within your field or compartment can change either rapidly (such as in disaster events like hail storms, fires or pest attack) or subtly (as in the case of some diseases, or water and nutrient deficiency). For this reason it is important to be able to frequently and cost-effectively monitor and run analytics on your resources to be able to detect when this happens be it on a large or small scale. The Planet constellation of satellites ranging from 3m (PlanetScope) to 80cm (Skysat) resolution make it possible to do just that on a daily, weekly, monthly or whatever time frame works best for you.