Went from sketching tree canopies by hand to AI estimating in about 3 years

Back in 2020 I was still using a clipboard and graph paper to map out property lines and count trees for quotes. Now I feed aerial drone footage into an AI tool that measures canopy volume and even identifies species within 5% accuracy. Saw a demo from a company out of Portland at a trade show and it cut my estimating time from 2 hours down to 20 minutes per job. Has anyone else had their whole planning process flipped by this kind of tech?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryang651mo ago

Man that's a wild shift in just 3 years. I switched from manual takeoffs to drone mapping about a year ago and it's the same kind of game changer for me. My advice is to double check the species ID on anything that's not a common hardwood or softwood, it can still slip up on weird hybrid trees. Have you had any trouble with the canopy volume measurements in dense thickets where the drone can't see the ground?

reese861mo ago

Yeah I ran into that exact problem with the dense thickets thing lol. What worked for me was doing the drone pass in early spring before the leaves fully came in, that way the AI could actually map the ground and lower canopy. Then I'd do a second pass in summer to catch the full leaf volume and it would cross reference both sets of data to fill in the gaps. It's not perfect but got my accuracy up from like 78% to 91% on those tricky spots. Also had to manually tag a few weird ornamental trees the species ID kept messing up on, but once you train it a couple times it learns fast.