Mapping the Spread of Invasive Cacti in Regional Australia
Partner: Cassinia Environmental
Date: April 2025
Location: Charlton, Victoria, Australia
Project Overview
Cassinia Environmental is a leader in biodiversity innovation, specializing in revegetation and restoration. With over 22,000 hectares of land management experience, they combine new approaches with a respect for nature. As Victoria's largest private land covenanter, they collaborate with traditional owners, communities, and corporations to protect 30% of all land by 2030.
Managing invasive species is critical to their mission. These species threaten native ecosystems, making tracking and monitoring essential for effective management.
This project aimed to map the spread of invasive cacti as a first step toward eradication. Using advanced geospatial tools, Project Kiwi helped Cassinia Environmental efficiently quantify and monitor infestations.
The Challenge
Managing invasive cacti presents a unique challenge:
- The sheer volume of cacti makes manual mapping methods somewhat impractical
- Cacti thrive in harsh conditions, making them difficult to eradicate
- The rapid spread of the species requires timely and accurate data
- Coordinating efforts across stakeholders demands a centralized and efficient mapping solution
Our Solution
Project Kiwi provided a comprehensive solution to map invasive cacti efficiently and accurately:
- High-accuracy drone mapping: Hosting detailed imagery of large areas, enabling precise identification of cacti infestations
- Automated segmentation tool: Accelerated polygon labeling, reducing the time required for manual annotation
- Fast iterative segmentation: Leveraged a small number of annotations to train a model that predicted cacti locations with high accuracy across a large area
A word from a real expert
"It is clear that going forward drones and AI will have the capacity to halt, and indeed undo, rampant ecological degradation. The question is what can we do now to push the technology forward to bring about that future sooner."
— Patrick Byrne, Research and Development Manager, Cassinia Environmental
Conclusion
We are thrilled to be pushing this area forward in collaboration with Cassinia Environmental. This partnership has been instrumental in advancing innovative solutions for invasive species management. Looking ahead, we hope to expand these tools to other parts of their work, including revegetation efforts, further supporting their mission to protect and restore biodiversity.
Michael Vaux
Chief Code Monkey at Project Kiwi