Case study / Alberta / Environmental
Three years of remediation documented twice a year
More than 400 acres of farmland where contaminated soil is being excavated, hauled away for cleaning and returned, recorded every May and every September for a remediation contractor.
The challenge
A remediation contractor carries a record keeping burden in two directions at once: to the operator paying for the work, and to the landowner whose quarter is being worked. Photographs taken by the crew doing the work answer neither well. What is needed is an independent record of each visit, in a form that compares directly against the last one.
The site
More than 400 acres of working farmland in Alberta, outside Edmonton. The location is deliberately unnamed here. Soil is excavated, taken away to be cleaned and brought back, in stages, across a program now in its third year.
Equipment and method
Two captures a year, in May and September, bracketing the open ground season. May catches the ground with the snow off and the crop barely up, so excavation and replacement are visible. September catches the same ground at the far end of the season with the crop mature. Alongside the documentation, multispectral capture over the crop records vegetation response across the affected ground against the rest of the field. Because the flights repeat to the same specification, every May compares to every other May and every September to every other September.
Airspace and safety
Rural airspace, with capture timed around field operations and the remediation crew's own schedule.
Deliverables
Orthomosaic and 2D and 3D outputs of the worked ground each visit, a DroneDeploy link, and multispectral index outputs over the crop. Each set dated and directly comparable to the previous visit.
Result
A record that now spans six captures over three years, which is something no single visit can produce and nobody can reconstruct after the fact. The contractor can show the operator and the landowner what the ground looked like at each stage, and what the crop did over it. We document what was captured. Any conclusion about soil recovery belongs to the agronomist and the environmental consultant, and the record is there for them to read.
Project statistics
- Area
- 400+ acres
- Cadence
- Twice a year, May and September
- Program length
- 3 years, ongoing
- Captures to date
- 6
- Sensors
- RGB and multispectral
- Client access
- Live DroneDeploy map link
- Engaged by
- The remediation contractor
Named references are provided during scoping, so you can speak directly to a client who has run this kind of work.