Digital environmental monitoring tool garners award success

Land-owners need to monitor their estate and land change, which requires data on a large scale. This is a huge challenge and when undertaken using current methods, could cost an organisation such as Highways England nearly £5m. 

Ramboll has therefore created an Intelligent Environmental Estate digital tool that enables landowners to utilise multiscale imagery to monitor their environmental assets more often and more cost-effectively. This in turn supports strategic decision-making, such as the prioritisation of improvement works, as well as the creation and monitoring of key environmental metrics. 

Emma Jones, Director at Ramboll explains, “The tool analyses satellite imagery via AI to accurately map habitats and automate decision making processes related to biodiversity. Through use of the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, we identify different landcover classes through their unique spectral signature, and trained a machine learning algorithm to recognise these signatures in order to identify different habitat types.”

We have a working prototype and are undertaking continued co-development with clients to further strengthen habitat and species mapping as well as carbon sequestration calculation. 

Martin Broderick, Senior Consultant at Ramboll, reflected on the Highways UK award process. “Following our successful shortlisting in October, all the finalists enjoyed a Dragons Den style presentation to the judges on 27th October. It kept us on our toes but was an enjoyable experience, one made all the better when we were confirmed as the winner on 2nd November.” 

Find out more about our Intelligent Environmental Estate solution.