CSI Wireless’ Aerial Swathing Technology Helps Restore Vegetation after Massive Forest Fires in Arizona and Colorado

GPS guidance products from CSI Wireless Inc. and its Satloc LLC subsidiary have played a key role in one of the largest vegetation restoration projects in U.S. history.

Forest fires that raged through northern Arizona and parts of Colorado in 2002, and again in Arizona in 2003, destroyed more than 500,000 acres of timber - leaving mountains and hillsides with no trees, grass or other ground-cover vegetation.

After the 2002 fires, government officials feared that rain and snow on the barren slopes would spark massive mudslides and clog rivers, lakes and municipal reservoirs. And so they quickly began preparing to re-seed the scarred land with a variety of soil-stabilizing grasses and wildflowers.

The territory requiring soil rehabilitation that year totaled a mind-boggling 175,000 acres, making it the largest re-seeding project ever conducted in North America.

Doing the job from the ground was impossible, due to the huge area that had to be re-seeded, and to the rugged terrain where the seed had to be applied. The obvious alternative was airplanes - essentially the same types of aircraft used for crop-dusting.

Knowing that Global Positioning System (GPS) technology has made crop-dusting a far more efficient process, government officials decided to employ the same technology for re-seeding.

They hired three firms to do the job: Aero-Tech Inc. of Clovis, New Mexico, and sub-contractors Sarita Aerial Contractors of Coolidge, Arizona, and M&M Air Service of Beaumont, Texas. For their GPS guidance, all three relied on Satloc M3’s - the popular aerial swath guidance systems designed and built by CSI Wireless.

Sarita owner John Pew says one of the most challenging aspects of the project was the fact although 400,000 acres of forest had been destroyed by fire, less than half that was earmarked for re-seeding. The areas to be re-seeded, on the steepest and most landslide-prone slopes, were scattered among terrain not earmarked for re-seeding.

“Looking down from the air, we didn’t know where to stop re-seeding and where to start again,” says Pew, who’s been using CSI/Satloc GPS products since 1996. “But the M3’s were great. There would have been no way to re-seed without that technology.”

The Satloc M3 software used government-supplied coordinates to create pictorial outlines of the areas to be re-seeded. “After that, it was like sending out a kid to paint with a colouring book,” recalls Pew. “All we had to do was stay inside the lines.”

“The outlines,” added M&M owner George Mitchell, made everything way more accurate and efficient.”

So much more accurate and efficient, in fact, that although the six pilots involved in the project had to distribute 4.8 million pounds of seed (equal to 18 transport trucks), they finished the task well ahead of time - taking only 16 days rather than the allotted 21.

The fact the planes were “equipped with Satloc GPS tracking/mapping systems permitted them to apply seed with precision accuracy at the desired rate,” reports Jim Youtz, a vegetation specialist with the U.S. Department of the Interior who helped coordinate the re-seeding project.

“I was extremely impressed with the end result: less than one-per-cent deviation from the desired application rate throughout the entire project area. This was verified both by documents of acres treated (and) seed quantities used, and by field reconnaissance.”

Youtz says the re-seeding would have gone ahead without GPS. But the technology enabled the re-seeding to be completed much more cost-efficiently and accurately.

How important was the re-seeding project?

“Most of the water in the states around here comes from the mountains,” Youtz says. “If there is no grass, there is no soil stabilization. Rain would have carried sand and silt down the slopes - plugging estuaries and springs, and contaminating reservoirs from which we get our drinking water. Re-seeding it quickly and efficiently was essential.”

The program was so successful in generating new vegetation and thereby stopping landslides that when major forest fires erupted in Arizona again in 2003 – including the 85,000-acre Aspen Fire north of Tucson – the government recruited Sirata Aerial Contractors and other companies with AirStar-equipped aircraft to begin re-seeding as soon as the embers had cooled.