Drone-based forest mapping for forest ecology and management


Open Forest Observatory

The Open Forest Observatory, a collaboration across universities and other partners, is working to make low-cost, AI-enabled drone-based forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public.

The OFO tools in development will be usable by groups and individuals with limited background in drones and remote sensing. All of our work is open-source (see our work on GitHub). We are keen to collaborate with anyone interested in using and/or contributing to our tools. Learn how to contact us.

OFO resources

Forest map data

We host databases of drone-derived data (catalog in development) and traditional field-based data at the same sites (web portal prototype), along with guidelines for others wishing to collect their own data.

Data >

Forest mapping tools

We develop and support easy-to-use tools to allow users to process their own drone imagery into individual-tree forest maps using current best-practices as defaults.

Tools >