PCI Geomatics company CATALYST is launching INSIGHTS Vegetation Management. This satellite-based monitoring service will help improve utility grid reliability by monitoring vegetation and helping determine where the grid is most at risk.
Vegetation is a major cause of power outages and contributes to infrastructure damage and bushfires. As extreme weather events become more frequent, utilities face increasing challenges in maintaining grid stability.
Managing vegetation is costly, with major US Utilities spending over USD100 million annually. However, this spending can be inefficient. Without insights into current vegetation conditions, traditional inspection and pruning programs revisit areas on fixed cycles rather than prioritising areas at highest risk.
CATALYST’s INSIGHTS Vegetation Management replaces fixed maintenance schedules with condition-based working informed by regular network-wide intelligence. Its insights enable arborists to optimise operations by focusing inspection and maintenance crews on areas where risk is highest. The solution also provides post-work verification to confirm the effectiveness of completed vegetation management activities.
Additionally, it can deliver critical insights into the extent and relative intensity of vegetation damage following extreme weather events.
INSIGHTS combines high-resolution satellite imagery with utilities’ and environmental data to identify high-risk trees and quantify threats. Unlike black-box AI models, it offers transparent, science-based risk assessments that can be customised to a utility’s needs.
“INSIGHTS Vegetation Management expands CATALYST’s suite of risk monitoring solutions, equipping utilities with intelligence to improve resilience and operational efficiency,” said PCI Geomatics CEO June McAlarey. “By leveraging advanced satellite technology, utilities can actively target vegetation risks, reducing outages and ensuring safer, more reliable service for their customers.”
As a data-as-a-service solution, INSIGHTS integrates with geographic information systems, enterprise resource planning platforms and field management tools, providing utilities with accessible actionable intelligence. Developed through CATALYST’s extensive experience in Earth observation analytics and advanced library of processing algorithms, INSIGHTS Vegetation Management delivers reliable and precise risk assessments tailored to utility operations.
INSIGHTS Vegetation Management is now available as the latest addition to CATALYST’s wide-area monitoring capabilities which also include INSIGHTS ground displacement monitoring, change detection, and terrain modelling.
