Ironwood Aerial Solutions — Early Southern Pine Beetle Detection

The detection window

An SPB spot is cheap to stop in week one and unaffordable by week six.

Southern Pine Beetle kills from the inside out. The tree is dead long before it looks dead — and conventional detection waits for the part you can see.

STAGE 01

Green attack

Beetles bore in. Pitch tubes form. Crown still fully green. Stress chemistry and canopy moisture begin to shift.

STAGE 02

Yellow fade

Needles start losing chlorophyll. Change is measurable in the near-infrared well before the eye registers it.

STAGE 03

Red crown

Now it's obvious — and the spot has already expanded outward into neighboring green timber.

STAGE 04

Gray snag

Needles gone. Salvage value gone. What's left is a removal cost and a much larger perimeter.

Ironwood survey window — where a cut-and-remove line still contains the spot

Where aerial sketch mapping and satellite imagery typically catch it

Every signal we can capture before visible damage makes the warning earlier, and an earlier warning is worth more standing timber. That is the entire point of the system.

Project Sentinel

Four sensors, one flight, one answer before we land.

Multispectral

Canopy stress

Near-infrared response picks up chlorophyll loss and moisture change in needles weeks before color shift is visible from the ground.

Thermal

Crown temperature

A tree that stops moving water stops cooling itself. Thermal contrast flags that shift across the stand.

LiDAR

Structure & terrain

Canopy structure and elevation give every reading a precise tree location you can actually navigate a crew to.

VOC

Chemical signature

Metal-oxide gas sensing adapted from underground mine gas detection, cross-applied to the volatile compounds a stressed pine puts off.

Edge AI

Onboard classification

Sensor streams are fused and classified in flight on an onboard compute module — not shipped off to somebody else's cloud for interpretation.

Deliverable

A map and a work list

You get flagged coordinates ranked by confidence, not a folder of raw imagery to figure out yourself.

Why it holds up

Built by people who have trusted a gas sensor with their own lives.

Ironwood's founder is a Navy veteran, MSHA-certified mine foreman, and mine rescue gas specialist who spent years underground building and maintaining custom gas detection systems where a drifting sensor was not an inconvenience. That is the same discipline — calibration, drift compensation, knowing when an instrument is lying to you — applied to a pine stand instead of a mine shaft.

Platform

AircraftArcsky X55 — Austin, Texas
Sensor suiteMultispectral · Thermal · LiDAR · VOC
ProcessingOnboard edge compute, in flight
Data handlingStored and processed in the US
PilotFAA Part 107 certificated
CoverageAlabama and adjoining states

What we fly

Survey work for people who own the timber, not just the map.

SVC 01 Early SPB detection survey

A full multi-sensor pass over your tract with flagged, ranked coordinates delivered as a map and a work list your crew can walk to. Best value on stands with a known spot nearby, recent thinning, or dense over-stocked pine.

SVC 02 Spot monitoring & re-flights

Repeat passes on a set interval over an active spot so you can see whether your cut line held or the perimeter is still moving. Change between flights is often more useful than any single flight.

SVC 03 Stand inventory & canopy mapping

LiDAR-derived canopy structure and terrain for tracts where you need a current picture of what is standing — thinning planning, access routes, and post-storm assessment.

SVC 04 Cooperator and agency pilots

Structured pilot programs with forestry agencies, timber operators, and research partners who want validation data on early-detection performance across real working stands. We are actively booking these.

By the time the crown turns red, you've already lost the stand.