>>We have 36 drones in the Virginia Department of Forestry.

We have 21 pilots that are FAA 107 certified, and we use the drones for different projects.

They include fire management, forest management, forest health, conservation easements, and the water quality program.

This is our Alta X with the Ignis Drone Amplified platform.

Bill, take off.

(drone whirring) For our water quality management, we use them for our best management practices, so it saves our foresters and water quality engineers and technicians time and actually reduces the risk for them to be out on a 300-acre tract or so and allows them to monitor how well the logging operations are taking place.

For fires, Each of our drones have a thermal camera, and the thermal camera allows us to monitor any fire that escapes our fire control lines, or if we see the fire spreading in a certain direction based on the fire behavior and the terrain.

That reduces exposure and mitigates firefighters going in areas which are unsafe.

>>For prescribed fire, we use it mainly to get the interior of a tract.

We'll have our certified prescribed burn managers using drip torches to burn on the sides along a firebreak, and then we'll use the drone to get the interior of a tract.

We're able to use these Dragon Eggs.

When it's injected with antifreeze, it forms a combustion when that ball hits the ground.

>>So the Forest Health program at the Virginia Department of Forestry monitors the state of Virginia for forest health disturbances.

Those disturbances can be invasive insects, they can be tree diseases, non-native invasive plants, even abiotic disturbances, things like big storms that come through and take out a lot of our trees.

Those are all things that cause damage to our forests, and so it's our job to try to monitor the state for them.

>>So how would you actually find that kind of damage?

Are people just, you know, hiking and looking up like I would be and saying, "Oh wow, that looks odd, that tree, that oak tree should have leaves now and it doesn't"?

>>Yeah.

A lot of our data does just come from reports from landowners, like you said, just out hiking around and noticing these things.

Also our foresters.

We have foresters in every part of Virginia, and so they let us know what they're seeing out in the field.

And when we hear about damage, then we'll go out and we'll try to do a more comprehensive survey to really map out the extent of the damage.

And so that's something that we've actually used planes for in the past.

Our staff will go up in a small aircraft with a tablet and some special mapping software and actually try to map out the damage that they're seeing in the canopy of the forest.

>>Wow.

So other than the planes, is there some other technology y'all are beginning to use to monitor forest health?

>>Yes, we're very excited that we are starting to incorporate drones into our forest health monitoring work.

We're kind of just scratching the surface on what we could use drones for.

There's so much technology that we hope to incorporate into our program in the future.

But right now, even something as simple as sending the drone up into the sky to take a picture of the canopy, that can really help us better understand the damage that's happening to our trees and potentially what could be causing that damage.

>>Wow, and so do you just work in the state forests?

I only know of one in my local area.

Are there many more across the state?

>>Yeah, we have 26 state forests in Virginia and we certainly monitor our state forests, but really all parts of Virginia that have forest land.

We're interested in any big forest health disturbances that may cause significant damage.

>>Then you work with private landowners as well?

>>We do.

We work a lot with private landowners.

All the information that we collect, all the data that we collect, we try to make that available to private landowners so they know where these disturbance agents are, where damage is in Virginia, and how they can better manage their own land.

>>Are you still looking for hemlock woolly adelgid, or has that pest basically left the state?

Because that was many years ago when I was seeing the hemlocks dying in our forests.

>>There's a long list, unfortunately, of insects and diseases and invasive plants.

The hemlock woolly adelgid is still an issue that's threatening our hemlock trees.

That's a tiny little insect that causes hemlock trees to lose needles, branch dieback, and then eventually tree death.

There's also the emerald ash borer, and that's another beetle, an invasive insect that's attacking our ash trees.

>>And then spongy moth.

Are we still worried about that?

I thought that had kind of died out maybe 20 years ago, but maybe not.

>>No, we still have spongy moth.

It's kind of one of our oldest invasive insects.

It's been established in Virginia for quite a while, since I think we first started to see spongy moth damage in the 1980s.

And so we'll have periods of time where we hardly see any spongy moth activity, and then we'll have years where the population will increase and we'll actually have outbreaks of spongy moth and we'll have significant damage.

And spongy moth is a caterpillar, so it actually eats the leaves of trees.

And when that happens during outbreak years, we'll see hundreds of thousands of acres of damage due to the spongy moth.

And then a lot of people are familiar with the spotted lanternfly.

That's one of our newest invasive insects that's also threatening multiple plants in Virginia.

>>Wow.

I had no idea that spotted lanternfly would be after our forests.

We're hearing a lot about it in our gardens and the havoc it could potentially wreak on our viticulture.

What would it be doing in the forests?

>>Well, we're not quite sure if it's a true forest invader yet.

There's still a lot of research going on about that, and since it's a new invasive, we don't fully know if it will invade our forests.

But we do know that it prefers tree of heaven, which is an invasive plant.

And so as part of our treatment program, we're trying to identify and remove tree of heaven to prevent the spotted lanternfly from spreading.

>>So Lori, how would you look for something like tree of heaven in the forest?

Even from the air, it seems like you'd be looking for a needle in a haystack.

>>Yeah, so in the past we've actually gone up in a helicopter to look for and identify pockets of tree of heaven.

And we're able to do this in the winter when the female trees retain their seed pods, so we're able to clearly see individual tree of heavens as we're flying over them.

But we are excited to start using drones for survey work like this in the future.

>>Wow, that's just incredible.

I just am blown away by how much you can do.

Thank you so much for all this information.

I've learned so much about how technology impacts and helps monitor forest health in the state of Virginia.

>>My pleasure, thank you.