Perth Voice Interactive

DRONES are flying surveillance runs over Kings Park to aid in the fight to save its 100-year old trees in declining health.

About 10 years ago scientists noticed a lot of the century-old native trees at Kings Park were starting to discolour and lose their leaves.

In 2020 when the rainbow bridge to the Perth Children’s Hospital was being built, the 

park authority called in Edith Cowan University geospatial scientists Dave Blake and Eddie van Ettan to monitor the vegetation for any further signs of decline.

“To monitor the declining health of the trees we developed a research project built around unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone surveillance,” Dr Blake, from ECU’s Conservation and Biodiversity Research Centre, said in a press release.

“At the time they were concerned that construction activities would impact the native trees in the area which are of high conservation value.”

They discovered the primary cause of the trees’ decline was iron-rich bore water which had been treated with additives in the 1990s.

The park is now experimenting with different irrigation strategies to see how best to nurse the trees back to good health. 

The drones run surveillance flights four to six times a year.

They collect colour, infra-red and thermal imaging to compare the health of trees in trials with a set of control trees.

“The challenge is, how do we monitor vegetation health across the whole of the park that allows us to detect vegetation decline in a timely manner,” Dr Blake said in a release.

“It’s impossible to monitor all the trees across the park using traditional monitoring methods. 

Using UAV technology allows us to survey the whole park in a few hours.”

If their research project is successful in picking which trees are healthy, Drs Blake and van Etten reckon the method could be rolled out for native tree preservation and reforestation projects across Australia.