Forestry and vegetation management are measurement problems spread over ground that is slow and expensive to walk. UAV Imaging flies them the same way we fly industrial sites: certified crews, calibrated sensors, and a georeferenced deliverable that goes straight into the system your team already uses.
This page covers work for forest companies and woodlot operators, and for the vegetation management programs run by utilities, pipeline operators and municipalities — different buyers, largely the same flights.
What we fly
Cutblock and road layout mapping
Current, high-resolution imagery and a terrain surface over a proposed block before layout is finalised. Ground conditions, wet areas, existing trails, watercourse crossings and access constraints show up in the imagery rather than on the first day of a crew being out there. The same capture supports road and landing layout and gives volumes where dirt will be moved.
Harvested-area as-built and block verification
A flight after harvest produces a measured record of what was actually cut: block boundaries, harvested area, retention patches, buffers left in place, landings and road disturbance. That is a reporting and reconciliation document, dated and georeferenced, produced in a fraction of the time a ground traverse takes.
Regeneration and stocking imagery
Imagery over regenerating blocks at a resolution where individual seedlings and the pattern of establishment are visible. This does not replace a stocking survey with a defined statistical procedure — it directs it. Flying the block first shows which areas are worth the plots and which are obviously performing, so ground effort goes where it changes the answer.
Right-of-way and corridor vegetation
Encroachment mapping along transmission lines, pipeline rights-of-way, access roads and rail corridors: where vegetation is approaching a clearance limit, where danger trees stand outside the corridor, where a right-of-way has closed in since the last cycle. Delivered as a mapped, prioritised set of locations a crew can be dispatched to, rather than a report describing the corridor in general. This overlaps directly with our utilities and transmission work, and with pipeline corridor patrol on the oil and gas side.
Stress, damage and disturbance detection
Multispectral capture across a stand measures vegetation response the eye cannot separate reliably, which is how insect activity, disease and drought stress become visible as a pattern before they are obvious from the ground. The NDVI glossary entry covers what the index actually measures. The same technique documents blowdown, flood and post-fire disturbance across an area as a dated, complete record.
Watercourse crossings, riparian buffers and reclamation
Imagery and surface data over crossings, buffer strips and reclaimed ground, captured to the same standard each cycle so the comparison between years is real rather than impressionistic. Useful anywhere a commitment has to be demonstrated rather than asserted.
Infrastructure in the bush
Bridge and culvert condition, road surface and washouts, camp and yard infrastructure, and close-range inspection of structures that are a long drive and a climb away. Standard inspection work, delivered on the same mobilisation as the mapping.
Common deliverables
- Orthomosaic of the block, corridor or area, georeferenced and measurable
- Digital surface model, contours and terrain products for layout and drainage
- Point cloud where structure and terrain are both needed
- Calibrated vegetation-index mapping for stress and condition work
- Mapped, prioritised encroachment or defect locations with coordinates
- Area and volume figures against a defined base surface, with an accuracy report
- Repeat-cycle captures flown to a consistent reference so change detection is defensible
- Close-range and thermal imagery of structures and infrastructure
What aerial capture does not do here
Forestry is the sector where the honest limits matter most, because canopy is exactly the thing that hides the ground.
- Photogrammetry sees the top of the canopy, not the ground beneath it. Over closed canopy, a photogrammetric surface is a canopy surface. Terrain under forest cover is a LiDAR question, and even then it depends on the canopy — our LiDAR vs photogrammetry comparison covers where each one is the right tool.
- Understory and stem-level detail are ground work. Species composition, stem quality, defect and disease confirmation, and anything requiring a diameter are collected under the canopy, not above it.
- Imagery directs a survey, it does not replace a procedure. Where a regulator, an agreement or a customer specifies a survey method, the flight informs and targets it; it does not substitute for it.
- We do not fly active wildfire airspace. Wildfire response airspace is restricted and belongs to the agencies operating in it. Our post-disturbance work is documentation after an area is released, not operations during an incident.
- We are not the interpreter of record. We produce measured imagery and data; the silvicultural, engineering and compliance judgements stay with your foresters and your professionals.
How the work runs in practice
Two things shape forestry scheduling more than anything else. The first is timing: stress detection, regeneration assessment and leaf-off terrain capture each have their own window, and a flight is booked against a condition with a flexibility range rather than a fixed date. The second is remoteness — access, crew travel and the airspace check over ground that often has aerodromes, strips and active aviation nearby. Both are handled at scoping, well before a mobilisation can be wasted.
Crews work out of Edmonton with routine coverage of the forested west and north of the province, including the Hinton and Grande Prairie areas. Multi-block and multi-corridor programs are scheduled as a single trip where the geography allows.
Everything is flown under a Transport Canada RPAS certificate appropriate to the operation, with liability insurance and documented procedures — the 2026 Alberta RPAS compliance guide covers what a buyer should expect to see, and the contractor compliance self-check turns that into a checklist you can run against any operator.
Getting started
Send the block, corridor or program area, the decision the data has to support, and the window you are working in. We will come back with what is flyable, what it produces, and what the airspace over that ground requires.