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The trees are home to birds and squirrels. They amaze us with their fall colors. They refresh us under their summer foliage. However — as we saw last week — they have difficulty coexisting with power cables during extreme weather episodes.
How to prune trees to the bare minimum, to take advantage of their benefits, while preventing the damage they can cause to electrical equipment?
With “high-precision forestry”, responds Christian Messier, scientific director of the Institute of Temperate Forest Sciences at the University of Quebec in Outaouais and holder of the NSERC / Hydro-Quebec Research Chair on the Control of tree growth.
“The ice storm that just happened is an invaluable source of information for us,” he said last week in a telephone interview with Dutyas icy branches still litter the ground in the metropolitan area.
As part of a project they are leading with Jakarto, a Quebec mobile mapping company, Mr. Messier and his colleagues have already “scanned” the trees along all the streets of Montreal. They intend to use the data collected to develop a digital tool that would help pruners.
“We would like to be able to determine, for each tree, which branches are at risk of falling if there are strong winds or ice, explains the researcher. And we would like to guide pruners to intervene on trees that are at risk, instead of pruning systematically, as we currently do, without knowing if it is really necessary. »
The data is collected using a lidar, that is to say a laser remote sensing device, which is attached to a car driving through the targeted streets. Marie-Jean Meurs, an artificial intelligence specialist from UQAM, is collaborating on the project to develop an algorithm capable of identifying branches that could fall on an electrical cable in the event of a storm.
The ice storm that has just occurred, for us, is an invaluable source of information
These days, Mr. Messier is mobilizing his team to drive the Jakarto vehicle back through some mapped streets. This will help determine exactly which branches gave way under the weight of the ice. It will thus be possible to improve the predictive model.
“It may sound like science fiction, but with new technologies and artificial intelligence, we think we will be able to come up with a functional tool in a few years,” says the forestry professor, who has been working for a fifteen years on ice and its biomechanical repercussions on trees.
Each year, Hydro-Québec technicians carry out more than 270,000 interventions on vegetation (pruning, deforestation and felling) to prevent breakdowns in the distribution network. On average, pruners from the state-owned company go back to each neighborhood every six years.