Sompo Japan to Launch Drone-Based Forest Research

In Japan, forests, which cover about 70 per cent of the archipelago, have increasingly been little managed or neglected completely by local authorities due to labour shortages and high costs.

Using drones and artificial intelligence will make it easier to gather and analyse data on forests, even those in hardly accessible terrain, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the new service, Sompo Risk Management Inc. takes charge of designing drone flight plans and collecting aerial research data and Hitachi Systems processes and analyses that data to determine the species, number, height and other features of trees.

By March next year, the companies expect to win more than 10 orders, mainly from local governments, with estimated sales of over 100 million yen.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]