For us, protecting forests transparently means that you can see, down to the square metre, exactly how your donation has been used. To achieve this, we take aerial photographs of our protected areas and pinpoint their exact geographical coordinates. Until now, however, this has been very time-consuming and resource-intensive.
On our most recent trip to Peru, we were assisted for the first time by drone pilots Martin Herkommer and Brock Ryder from the Munich-based company Quantum Systems, with whom we are now collaborating. Together, we were able to produce unprecedented high-resolution aerial images of vast areas of forest in a very short space of time.
Flights were also carried out using LIDAR and multispectral cameras. These enable us to generate 3D and thermal images of the forest, which can be used to assess CO2 sequestration and biodiversity in the forested areas.
This not only saves us a great deal of time and donor funds that we would otherwise have spent on time-consuming and, in some cases, dangerous site surveys. Above all, it gives us the opportunity to explore current and future protected areas without having to disturb them by entering them or creating paths. We would not have been able to survey, explore and document such large areas of woodland with conventional drones and a ground team with this level of accuracy and comprehensiveness, even over the next few years.
The purchase agreement for these areas, covering approximately 3,000 hectares, will be signed in the next few days. We therefore hope to be able to make them available to you on the platform to protect them soon!
Another advantage is our collaboration with the software company Pix4D, thanks to which thousands of individual aerial photographs can be stitched together into a single large aerial image in just a few hours. In the past, this work would have required up to 800 hours of manual labour from volunteers.
Furthermore, Quantum Systems may potentially help us in the future to monitor the areas at regular intervals, so that unauthorised entry and activities on our land can be prevented.
Many thanks to Martin, Brock, Quantum Systems and Pix4D!
We also used the trip to further develop our forest guardian programme, film environmental education videos and establish contacts with potential members for our Peruvian foundation. We’re sure to remember our encounters with a tree porcupine, an anteater, various snakes, as well as many frogs and spiders, tamarin monkeys, macaws, ants, screaming pihas, a sloth and many, many more.