How drones and AI could help stem the spread of a plant invading Quebec parks | 24CA News

Next time you are in certainly one of Quebec’s provincial parks, have a look round. Notice something that should not be there? 

You possible would not, as a pesky invasive plant wreaking havoc on native biodiversity, referred to as the frequent reed, holds true to its title.

The alien grass could be noticed throughout a lot of the province and the nation, spreading via marshes and in ditches alongside highways.

Tall with a woody stem and clusters of flowers that begin purple and switch wheat-coloured, the frequent reed can be present in seven of Quebec’s 23 provincial parks — for now. 

“The common reed is a really aggressive, invasive species, and when it arrives, it takes almost all the biodiversity,” mentioned Antoine Caron-Guay, a researcher at Montreal’s Institut de recherche en biologie végétale (IRBV).

In Îles-de-Boucherville provincial park, positioned on a sequence of islands on the St. Lawrence River between Montreal and the South Shore, giant areas have been colonized by the plant, turning into big reed beds that deprive the park’s animals of meals and habitat.

“There’s a lot of interesting species here, and the common reed is like a threat to [them all],” mentioned Caron-Guay. 

Quebec’s highest focus of frequent reed is discovered within the park, in keeping with Caron-Guay. So the researcher has begun experimenting with drones and synthetic intelligence to map the plant’s relentless unfold in hopes of nipping it within the bud — so to talk.

How the know-how works

Before you may cease the unfold of an invasive species, that you must know the place it might already be discovered.

While the mature frequent reed colonies are fairly straightforward to identify, because the reeds can develop greater than 5 metres tall, Caron-Guay is making an attempt to establish the vegetation whereas they’re nonetheless very younger, to cease them from getting a foothold.

To conduct his subject analysis all through May and September of 2022, he used two giant drones to take a mess of high-resolution aerial pictures, flying them via the air to map the world beneath intimately.

He took these pictures again to a lab and fed them into an AI program that he educated to search for frequent reed vegetation from above.

Once the AI is aware of what it is in search of, it might analyze new pictures in minutes and even seconds. Caron-Guay says his program, for which preliminary outcomes present about 90 per cent accuracy, can be utilized to velocity up the work of park conservation officers. 

Sophie Tessier, co-ordinator of the conservation and training service for the Îles-de-Boucherville park, agrees. 

“If you had … someone really go [out in] the field with a pen and paper, maybe taking pictures, maybe taking some samples, that would be a really long project without the drone,” she mentioned. 

“But now, with technology, you could have lots of data and just maybe one person doing the work of, let’s say, 10 botanists in the field. But that doesn’t mean that technology will take over all the human aspects of it.” 

Common reed elimination can take years

That’s as a result of people nonetheless must validate the findings of the AI — and even as soon as you understand the place the vegetation are, you continue to must eliminate them. 

Caron-Guay says the smaller the plant, the better it’s to clear. 

“You have to put local herbicide with a sponge, and it won’t affect the environment around,” he mentioned. “But when you have a big colony, it is much harder.”

Ripping out mature vegetation is troublesome, as frequent reed can reproduce simply from a small piece of stem or rhizome left behind, which means the earth across the vegetation should even be eliminated and changed with uncontaminated soil.

As the plant hates shade, Caron-Guay mentioned it can be eradicated by masking it with a big tarp which deprives it of solar and suffocates it, however this course of can take years.

Tessier says the park is utilizing the tarp methodology, and it takes each day effort to verify nothing is rising again.

Future of AI for different invasive species

Caron-Guay is now testing to see if the AI program can nonetheless give correct outcomes with decrease high quality pictures shot by smaller, extra consumer-sized drones, that are cheaper and do not require a drone pilot certificates to function. 

That would make the sort of analysis extra accessible to different researchers and probably expedite conservation efforts. 

The discount of invasive species by 50 per cent by 2030 was a key purpose agreed upon on the UN biodiversity summit, generally known as COP15, held in Montreal in December. 

Étienne Laliberté, Caron-Guay’s supervisor and a professor in plant ecology at Université de Montréal, says that Quebec’s provincial parks are primarily open-air analysis labs the place scientists can check out initiatives like Caron-Guay’s and see the real-world impacts they’ve on conservation efforts. 

Laliberté is already overseeing another researchers who’re additionally utilizing drones for various facets of biodiversity analysis. He believes this know-how might have purposes for different invasive species, too.

“I’m thinking, for example, in particular the water chestnut, which is an aquatic plant that is taking over rivers and lakes,” he mentioned. 

“It’s actually quite difficult, obviously, to find it because it moves around with the current, and so I think this technology … is sort of the first steps.”

Laliberté mentioned you can additionally possible use the identical know-how to map the impacts of pests just like the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle, by figuring out broken ash timber. 

As for the way forward for the Îles-de-Boucherville park and the combat towards the frequent reed, Caron-Guay is trying ahead to the day when he can witness the fruits of his labour. 

“It could be a small impact. I won’t change the world, but I hope that someday, like in a few years, I could come here and see that there’s a place where there’s no common reed,” he mentioned.

Seeing the return of the least bittern, an endangered fowl species affected by the lack of its pure habitat to the frequent reed, would even be a testomony to his efforts. 

“To see that this species could return to the Îles-de-Boucherville park would be truly magical. It would be seeing that my work has served a purpose.”