Data has become an invaluable asset in the Canadian environment industry. Collected data helps us evaluate chemical levels in our soil and water, track ecosystem changes through time, and understand how spaces are affected by human activity.
In biodiversity protection and restoration efforts, data is just as beneficial. It allows to track changes in air and land temperatures, count the number of plant and wildlife species, assess habitat change over time and survey changes to water levels and volumes. Understanding these different points of data are key in appreciating the best solution for a given scenario.
The status quo in ecological data collection has been the same for centuries; field observations. Experts would venture out into a given part of an ecosystem and collect samples, observe patterns, or count species during a period of observation. While these experts have impressive skills; for example, identifying over a hundred bird species just by listening to their calls in a forest, they are limited in the amount of time they can spend surveying remote ecosystems, limiting the chance they encounter all species, especially rare species. In Canada, extreme weather conditions in some environments also introduce additional barriers and safety hazards which limit duration and quality of in-person surveying.
One of the biggest barriers to protecting biodiversity has indeed been a lack of knowledge and reliable understanding of species richness, interactions and behavior in the many unique ecosystems human development impacts. It has been difficult to understand challenges and opportunities with limited data, and even harder to make decisions regarding possible courses of action confidently.
Innovation is changing this, and it’s allowing for companies like WSP to provide stronger, more accurate results that optimize the overall solutions that can be provided.
Creating In-house Solutions
There are a number of technologies that provide a foundation for the emergence of innovations that can support activities related to biodiversity, such as multispectral cameras, AI, drones, sensors and more. None of these on their own can do the job of replacing human field studies, but combining and modifying technologies can provide valuable results.
This is the work being conducted in WSPs own innovation lab. The Sherbrooke laboratory is run by a multidisciplinary team whose mission it is to create solutions specific to challenges presented by clients, as well as push forward the state-of-the-art tools, knowledge and practice they develop. Their innovations free up experts to apply their skills to higher level analysis and knowledge development instead of frequent field visits and repetitive data processing.
The lab has created multiple solutions which are already benefitting team members across Canada, across sectors. One of the solutions developed at the lab combines the use of drone technology with high-definition cameras and multi-spectral scanning. This technology has found many applications, from improved species detection in difficult-to-survey landscapes, to creating 3D ‘bio-twins’ of ecosystems—digital copies of environments that facilitate study over time and change-detection.
To give a sense of the power of these tools, whereas a human expert found 18 at-risk turtles surveying a body of water within a one-hour timeframe, the drone identified 74 of the turtles, in the same area, in just 15 minutes. The bio-twins, meanwhile allow experts to detect granular changes in ecosystems; by comparing images taken at known intervals, they can track everything from plant growth, wildlife movement, and species richness.
The technologies the Sherbrooke lab develop also have the advantage of being autonomous, and are specifically built to withstand harsh environments on land, in streams or at sea. This means they can be left in the field to survey for long periods of time, capturing multiple forms of data from cameras, sensors, and scanners, and transmitting it back in real time for analysis. Paired with AI-assisted data processing, these technologies enable ecological studies at speeds and with accuracy never before possible.
The impacts of this type of remote, real-time monitoring and analysis include decreased ecosystem disruption from field visits, and real-time adaptation to observations. For example, clients can pause disruptive operations when vulnerable species are present, and resume as soon as they are gone, allowing for close-to-continuous work rather than extending operations due to uncertainties based in the limits of human observation.
The data collected can also be shared with government authorities and clients to provide depictions of what is happening on the ground as a result of climate change, changing weather patterns, or nearby development, with higher accuracy and precision than ever before.
These emerging technologies, ones that we are able to develop thanks to the team working in WSP’s Innovation lab, provide the data needed to create better solutions and make better decisions in biodiversity protection and restoration.
Contacts
Richard Brunet - Sherbrooke Innovation Lab Director
Mathieu Deshaies - Sherbrooke Innovation Lab Manager
