VILLAGE OF FAYETTEVILLE – The Village of Fayetteville has begun a pilot program in partnership with the Central New York Regional Planning and Development Board and a team from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry to work on a tree inventory. The collaboration kicked off on June 20 with Canal Landing Park as a test site for the drone mapping of trees in the community.
The control-operated rotorcraft brought in by ESF professor Bahram Salehi and graduate assistant Sina Jarahizadeh followed different paths around the park and came back to a landing pad by the playground. All the while, its identification software and the multi-spectral and LiDAR sensors onboard gathered details on the local trees with photographs and thermal sensing. As the drone was navigated, a portion of the data collection dealt with calibrating the positions of individual trees picked out from densely forested areas.
“It exactly tells you, ‘This point is located within XYZ coordinate in the worldwide system,” Salehi said. “That’s called spatial accuracy. It’s very, very precise.”
Salehi, who teaches remote sensing engineering and has 20-plus years of experience with drones, said the artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms developed for the airborne technology also process data relating to the health of the trees and properties like height, species and crown areas.
“Then we actually have data that we can work with rather than walking around and guessing,” Fayetteville Trustee Mark Matt said. He said the new program will remove not only much of the guesswork but also the time, cost and labor that would be involved with completing the tree-monitoring process manually with items like tape measures.
Salehi said the flights are actually the easiest part of the workload and that he and others make sense of all the information upon returning to their on-campus laboratory. Because the drones make use of satellite observation, visibility levels lessened by cloud cover, rain or the type of haze seen earlier in June are taken into account.
Calling it a “vital tool” for the village, Matt said the pilot program will streamline the maintenance of Fayetteville’s trees for the department of public works and the parks department because it will automatically be known when trees should be replaced and what invasive species are in the area. From there, the village can be on better standing to secure funding for those tree replacements after events like destructive storms similar to the one the week of Labor Day in 1998, he said.
These tree-tracking efforts are part of the village’s participation in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Climate Smart Communities program, through which municipalities check off environmentally conscious accomplishments to earn points and certifications.
Matt said trees can serve the purpose of cooling environments, providing sound abatement, cleansing the air and producing a “calming effect” that, judging by past traffic studies, causes drivers to slow down once they encounter streets lined with trees.