Precise Tree Counts With Aerial Surveying

Walk into a bank asking for a substantial loan, and when they ask what your core assets are worth, shrug and say "around fifty thousand, give or take". You would be shown the door.

Yet whether you are managing a game reserve, running a commercial orchard or valuing newly purchased farmland, the tree count behind those decisions is usually an educated guess. We track every tractor to the cent and estimate the standing timber by eye.

This discussion works through how a single flight replaces days of field counting — and why a camera looking straight down at tree crowns is looking at precisely what it needs to see.

It covers what you actually receive: individual trees as mapped points with coordinates, the measured height and crown size of each one, canopy cover in hectares, density per hectare, and size class distribution. Then what that enables — valuing standing timber, planning thinning, running an orchard by exact block counts, quantifying browse for game, and proving change between surveys.

It gives real time to where the method is strongest: orchards and plantations, where regular spacing makes counts highly reliable, and savanna where scattered trees with visible ground between them are ideal conditions.

And it is straightforward about accuracy — counts are highly reliable where crowns are separated, while under closed canopy the survey measures total extent and height accurately and individual stem counts become well-founded estimates.