TV viewers may well have become used to seeing impressive aerial views of nature in environmental programmes, but a company based in Cumbria are taking gathering footage and detailed analysis of it to another level.
HiDef Aerial Surveying Ltd have become one of the world’s leading experts in this specialist area of work.
With a presence in Australia and the United States but firmly rooted in Workington, the company have carved a niche in an area of work that has implications for us all.
“Our biggest area of survey work is for the offshore energy industry who may need data collecting regularly for 12 or even 24 months,” Aidan Harrison, HiDef’s associate director of operations, says.
The company works to create environmental impact assessments for projects such as new wind farms.
Creating an accurate record of the bird-life nearby including their migratory routes is all possible using state of the art equipment and expert analysis of the images that result.
The equipment is so sensitive that it can also monitor sea-life including marine mammals.
The work is exhaustive. First gathering imagery of a certain area to identify both natural and man-made features. Drones, light aircraft and even satellites are used to build up an accurate picture.
Then painstaking analysis is undertaken to provide clients with an accurate picture of the wildlife that may be in the area.
Over the last 14 years interest in this work has increased and in 2019 HiDef formed an alliance with companies in France and Germany, each able to capitalise on their own skills and areas of specialism.
“We have 137 staff now working across eight countries,” Aidan says and highlights bases in both Sydney and Melbourne in Australia as well as Jacksonville in Florida.
The company has eight aircraft on call – six in the UK with one each based in the US and Australia.
Staff from Cumbria can spend time in the other base locations learning more about the particular challenges in these very different markets.
It’s not unusual to spend six or seven hours offshore on missions that collect the kind of data that could help decide whether a project should go ahead.
Yet all worldwide flight operations are coordinated from the company’s West Cumbria base with a team of 40 reviewing data in a specialist centre at Lillyhall, near Workington, working closely with a similar number of ornithologists.
Many of those employed are from Cumbria and the company has just recruited seven more data reviewers to join the team.
“Our client base is small but these are organisations that are active world-wide and we’re proud to be globally recognised for the work we do,”Aidan says. “The market is enormous, particularly in the US, but we’re looking at opportunities in South America and Africa where wind turbine technology is in its infancy.”
