Source:  NCSU COOPERATIVE EXTENSION, 9/17/20


Shielding their eyes from the bright morning sun, a group of researchers from North Carolina State University looked up to watch a drone take flight over a grove of trees. This was reconnaissance for another battle in a long-running fight – one that the trees are losing. 

With an audible hum, the drone flew over the grove at 200 feet in a perfect, lawn-mower pattern, taking pictures. Working with geospatial data and images from the drone, the researchers will create a visual map of healthy, unhealthy and dead trees. 

The researchers hope to identify individual green ash trees that might be winning the fight against the invasive emerald ash borer, or Agrilus planipennis, an insect that feeds on ash trees and kills them in the process. They want to use what they can find about the trees’ natural resistance to help conserve ash trees as a whole. The flight was their first attempt – a pilot effort – to see if the strategy might work.

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