When spruce turns red, the tree is already dead. The beetles bore under the bark and cut off the flow of water, the needles dry out and turn rust red, and by the time you can see that color the beetles have bred and moved to the next tree. For a forest owner, that red is the sound of money walking away.
This is the problem Kelluu set out to attack at Koli. Together with the University of Eastern Finland and the National Land Survey of Finland, Kelluu became the first in the world to use an autonomous airship to study the bark beetle damage that kills spruce forests. The aim is simple. See the damage earlier, map it accurately, and act while there is still something to save.
Bark beetle outbreaks move fast and hide well. The early signs are subtle and easy to miss from the ground. You need eyes overhead, often, and in detail.
The usual tools each fall short. Satellites cover wide ground but the picture is coarse, and here in the north clouds block the view for much of the year. Aircraft and helicopters give detail but they are expensive, so you fly them rarely, which means you miss the window. Drones are accurate but only over one site at a time.
Kelluu's airship sits in the middle. It flies below the clouds, so the weather stops being the gatekeeper. It stays up for more than 12 hours, so it covers real ground in one pass. And it reads the forest at centimeter accuracy, where one pixel equals one centimeter on the ground. That is detail fine enough to catch a stand in trouble before the damage is obvious to anyone walking through it.
This is not a science demo for its own sake. It points straight at the cost of every outbreak.
Catch the damage early and you can fell and remove the infested trees before the next generation of beetles spreads. You salvage timber value instead of writing it off. You contain the outbreak instead of chasing it. And you do it with a clear, accurate map of where the damage actually is, not a guess.
It is also cheaper to fly. The airship is quieter, emits less, and costs less to operate than a plane or a helicopter. So you can fly it more often. More often is the whole point, because with bark beetle the difference between early and late is the difference between a managed loss and a dead stand.
As the climate warms, these outbreaks are getting worse and more frequent. The forests need watching more closely, not less. This is what closer watching looks like.
"Airship drones make monitoring more agile and efficient. They can fly below the clouds, and are less emitting and cheaper than airplanes or helicopters. Autonomous airships combined with artificial intelligence can be widely used in science and society. The management of bark beetle damage is a perfect example of this," says Eija Honkavaara, research professor at the National Land Survey of Finland's Centre for Spatial Research.
The work at Koli is a first. It is also a preview of how forests get protected from here on. Watch the whole area, in detail, often enough to act in time.
MORE FROM THIS (only in Finnish) >