Precision Detection and Assessment of Ash Death and Decline Caused by the Emerald Ash Borer Using Drones and Deep Learning.

Emerald ash borer () is an invasive pest that has killed millions of ash trees ( spp.) in the USA since its first detection in 2002. Although the current methods for trapping emerald ash borers (e.g., sticky traps and trap trees) and visual ground and aerial surveys are generally effective, they are inefficient for precisely locating and assessing the declining and dead ash trees in large or hard-to-access areas. This study was conducted to develop and evaluate a new tool for safe, efficient, and precise detection and assessment of ash decline and death caused by emerald ash borer by using aerial surveys with unmanned aerial systems (a.k.a., drones) and a deep learning model. Aerial surveys with drones were conducted to obtain 6174 aerial images including ash decline in the deciduous forests in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, USA. The ash trees in each image were manually annotated for training and validating deep learning models. The models were evaluated using the object recognition metrics: mean average precisions () and two average precisions ( and ). Our comprehensive analyses with instance segmentation models showed that Mask2former was the most effective model for detecting declining and dead ash trees with 0.789, 0.617, and 0.542 for and , respectively, on the validation dataset. A follow-up in-situ field study conducted in nine locations with various levels of ash decline and death demonstrated that deep learning along with aerial survey using drones could be an innovative tool for rapid, safe, and efficient detection and assessment of ash decline and death in large or hard-to-access areas.