CASE STUDY:
Macaw Recovery Network.
Meet the Great Green Macaw.
Critically endangered parrot, between 500 and 1000 individuals in the wild.
Dependent on Mountain Almond Trees for food and nesting habitat.
Loss of Mountain Almond Tree habitat is main cause of decline.
Mountain Almond Trees are critical to Macaw survival – providing both food and habitat.
Mountain Almond →
Tree
The problem:
How do you locate
every Mountain Almond Tree
in a 1,000 hectare reserve?
How we did it.
Advanced imagery.
Through a series of flights, we imaged the entire MRN Reserve in RGB, Hyperspectral, and LIDAR.
Understory.ai partnership.
We leveraged existing AI solutions with hyperspectral fingerprinting to identify Mountain Almonds across the entire reserve.
Codeveloped method.
Key ground truthing data captured with MRN staff informed the development of the AI model.
What We Accomplished.
Whole-reserve
resolution, fast.
We scanned the entire reserve in just 8 days. It would take 12 people 2 months to manually survey the same area.
With new CTA hardware, we can now scan this area in just two days.
AI-Powered
Species ID.
We leveraged existing AI solutions with hyperspectral fingerprinting to identify Mountain Almonds across the entire reserve.
Browsable
baseline survey.
Our data is accessible in a dashboard to browse species composition across the reserve, prioritizing areas for focused conservation efforts.
See the data.
Scalable solution.
Whole-forest species ID.
Can we find every mountain almond tree?
Yes.
Can we find