WA growers battling skeleton weed could soon have an extra tool in their belt, following successful trial work by the Department of Agriculture and Food (DAFWA) using drones.
After three years of research funded by the Grains, Seeds and Hay Industry Funding Scheme (GSHIFS), patches of skeleton weed can be located from the air using specially designed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and camera technology.
DAFWA skeleton weed project manager Martin Atwell said the new technology had the potential to save hundreds of hours of manual surveillance.
“We can cover 600 or 700 hectares a day, which is comparable with what we’re doing now or better,” he said.
“As you can imagine driving around a paddock for eight hours a day, that’s quite an arduous task, so we’re just looking at what could be a better option to supplement what we’re doing at the moment, that’s why we’re targeting the drones.
“It’s a lot less intrusive than people going and driving in paddocks because there is biohazard issues with that and also staffing issues.
“It’s a much more productive, more efficient way of doing things.”
Skeleton weed has been affecting WA growers, particularly in the eastern Wheatbelt, for more than 40 years and costs the State an estimated $5.3 million each year when managed.
The infested area across WA is about 1400 hectares and DAFWA surveys close to 180,000ha each year to ensure the weed is controlled.
Trial work using drones began through DAFWA’s Skeleton Weed Program in 2014 in collaboration with UAV specialist company Sensorem, on the back of $50,000 of funding by the GSHIFS.
Sensorem director Ed Boxall said following on-going development of the technology, the specially designed drone is able to accurately pinpoint skeleton weed within one metre.
“The drone flies in a survey pattern just like a manned aircraft would fly over an area,” he said.
“It takes images about every second and then the images are run through a computer software program that looks at all of the components of the image and works out which ones could possibly be skeleton weed.
“It has GPS longitude and latitude embedded in the image file, so it comes up with a particular location and says this is skeleton weed.
“We mark out the areas where the plants are, we treat them in winter and then we’ll search them again the next year and if there’s still plants there, we’ll go through the same process again.”
Mr Boxall said the Cinestar 8 – a large eight-engined multirotor drone from American company Freefly Systems – had proven the most suitable for skeleton weed detection throughout the trial, with the use of a German navigation system and a 150 megapixel camera.
The drone costs about $30,000 and can be operated remotely or autonomously with a battery life of up to 35 minutes.
Mr Boxall said Sensorem was focusing on improving the software to allow detection of singular skeleton weed plants.
“The original scope of works was to get clumps – maybe five or six plants – but we’ve now given ourselves a target of finding individual plants so we’ve set the bar quite high,” he said.
“Next is to continue to refine the software program, to refine the algorithm, to continue to input some more data to help train the algorithm and at the same time look at increasing the quality of the camera system to get even better quality images and prepare for this coming season.
“The end game is to complement the current way of searching for skeleton weed.
“The idea is not to completely replace that because at this stage drones can search but they can’t spray the amount of chemicals that is needed to destroy the plant, so it’s really just a complementary technology to what is being done already.
“Hopefully we can cover a much larger area where, in the past, ground-based contractors weren’t able to cover.”
GSHIFS has invested a further $45,000 this year to continue the trial and further enhance the technology.
GSHIFS industry management committee chairman Ron Creagh said the technology had the potential to save the agricultural industry millions of dollars.
“The beauty about skeleton weed is if we can find it, we can eradicate it,” he said.
“It’s something that will save us hugely because we invest a lot of money in searching and surveillance.
“I see its potential as unlimited, it will add some science to the Skeleton Weed Program and it’s just something that’s going to enhance agriculture as much as GPS has and other technology.”
Mr Creagh said the technology could be used to help combat other biosecurity threats in the future.
“At the moment it’s all about skeleton weed as far as the technology goes but one day it could be about a much more serious form of incursion,’’ he said.
“That’s why we’ve got to do this research and be involved in biosecurity issues because eventually it will be about something that’s far more serious than skeleton weed.”
