CAA-Approved Forestry Surveys

Drone Forestry & Canopy Surveys.

Compare quotes from specialist UK drone operators for stand inventories, canopy-height models, AI-assisted tree counts, multispectral disease detection, and Forestry Commission grant-audit imagery.

“Every drone pilot on this network is personally vetted by me — insurance, qualifications, flight history.”

Peter Leslie · Founder & GVC Drone Pilot

Trusted by site managers & agencies across the UK

Need a woodland surveyed?

Post your details to compare quotes from forestry-specialist drone pilots.

Ground cruises can't keep up with a modern woodland.

Woodland managers, forestry consultants, and estate foresters make silvicultural and grant decisions with incomplete data. A canopy-height model captures every tree in the stand in a single flight.

Ground Cruises Are Expensive

Sample-plot cruises extrapolate from a tiny percentage of the actual stand. For high-value timber or grant-audited planting, a drone census captures every individual tree — more defensible and, at scale, cheaper.

Canopy Condition Invisible

You cannot see canopy stress from the ground. A multispectral flight picks up dieback, drought stress, and early disease expression weeks before a walk-through would, across thousands of hectares in a single session.

Grant Audit Pressure

EWGS, WCPG, and post-planting grant audits demand evidence of establishment and survival. Drone imagery is the most defensible, time-stamped record available — and the Forestry Commission is increasingly comfortable with it.

Grant auditors want documented methodology.

By Peter Leslie, Founder & GVC Drone Pilot

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Forestry Commission auditors don't want a pretty orthomosaic. They want to know the flight parameters, the GCPs, the AI tree-count model, the confidence interval, and whether the dataset can be independently reproduced.

Every forestry survey on this network is flown by drone operators delivering a full methodology report alongside the canopy-height model, tree inventory, and multispectral imagery — everything an auditor or a purchaser's due-diligence team will ask for.

The result is a stand dataset that underpins management plans, valuations, and grant payments — and still makes sense five years later for change-detection.

Audit-Traceable Methodology

PDRA01 & £5M Public Liability

Deliverables your management plan needs.

Our network operators deliver stand-level datasets ready for inventory, disease response, and grant submission.

Canopy Height Models

CHM rasters giving height of every pixel of canopy above bare-earth, delivered as GeoTIFF. Perfect for silvicultural planning, valuations, and objective change-detection across rotations.

AI Tree Inventories

Segmented tree inventories as point shapefile, one point per tree, with crown area, height, and species class. Over 95% detection accuracy on clear coniferous and broadleaved stands.

Disease Detection Overlays

Multispectral NDVI / NDRE anomalies flagging suspected Phytophthora, Ips typographus, chalara, or drought stress. Direct input to your health walk-over and Forestry Commission notifiable pest submission.

Book your forestry survey in 3 steps.

We connect you with the specific forestry-survey specialists you need, instantly.

Describe the Stand

Tell us the area, the species mix, and the output (CHM, tree count, disease, grant). Takes under two minutes.

Compare Specialists

We route your brief to forestry-specialist drone operators in your region. You receive competitive quotes with sensor type, AI model, and delivery format.

Fly & Report

Your drone pilot files airspace permissions, flies the stand, and delivers a full data pack including CHM, tree inventory, multispectral overlays, and methodology report.

Start Your Project Brief

Every tree counted, every grant defensible.

See how woodland managers, forestry consultants, and estate foresters rely on drone forestry surveys through our network.

"Our Sitka stand valuation used to rely on sample plots. The drone census came back with crown area and height per tree across 140 ha. The purchaser's due diligence team accepted the number without a single counter-sample."

Angus M.

Woodland Manager, Inverness

"Our Phytophthora monitoring programme is transformed. The multispectral anomaly map narrowed a full-estate walk down to eight target compartments and the suspected infection sites came back positive in three of them."

Eleanor P.

Forestry Consultant, Bangor

"Grant-audit evidence on 22 ha of new planting: dated imagery, tree count, survival percentage. The Forestry Commission signed off on the spot. I don't want to go back to clipboard-and-paper sampling."

Hugh T.

Estate Forester, Petworth

Forestry Survey FAQ

Technical questions on grant evidence, disease detection, and tree counting.

Will the survey support Forestry Commission grant evidence?

Yes. Network operators supply dated, geo-referenced orthomosaics, tree inventories with survival percentage, and a full methodology report. That package has been accepted for EWGS, WCPG, and Scottish Forestry grant-audit evidence on multiple client schemes.

Which multispectral options detect disease?

Calibrated multispectral payloads (MicaSense RedEdge-P or Altum-PT) resolve the red-edge anomaly signatures associated with Phytophthora, Ips typographus, chalara, and drought stress. The drone survey is a triage and screening tool — ground truthing by a qualified forester confirms the cause.

How accurate are AI-assisted tree counts?

On clear-canopy coniferous and broadleaved stands with distinct crowns, modern AI detection routinely exceeds 95% match to a manual count. Dense, overlapping natural regeneration is trickier — the confidence interval is always reported alongside the figure so the user knows what to trust.

Can you segment the tree inventory by species?

Yes — with multispectral imagery and training samples we can segment mixed stands into the major species classes with useful accuracy (Sitka spruce vs Scots pine, broadleaves vs conifers, oak-dominant vs beech-dominant). Species-level precision still benefits from ground-truth sampling.