Drones to be used to map exercise areas and invasive plants

More and more invasive plant species are putting down roots in Danish soil, sometimes at the expense of the original native flora.

Danish Defence is using drones to provide an overview of the invasive plants at their many exercise facilities. The reason is that Danish Defence wants to encourage nature in its exercise areas, and as part of these efforts it intends to combat invasive species. From 2018, nature conservation on Defence land is being handed over to a private company so the Danish Defence team itself will have less knowledge of the natural status of the areas concerned in future.

In spring 2017, COWI won the contract for a project to map the Kulsbjerge and Nørre Uttrup exercise areas over a season with the aim of identifying invasive plants.

The project will record the spectral signatures of a number of invasive plants by use of analyses of datasets obtained with drones.