The problem

Floating invasive aquatic weeds can rapidly clog up lakes, reservoirs and navigation canals, leading to major economic impacts for businesses, fisheries and leisure activities. Their growth and spread is problematic in fresh waters across the globe, but particularly in tropical and sub-tropical regions.

As free-floating weeds can move rapidly, pushed by winds and currents, providing a frequent and complete picture of their coverage across waterbodies is key to inform boat access, target weed control programmes, and provide early warning of weed problems in new locations.

Currently, surveys are carried out from boats or helicopters which can be expensive and are limited in coverage and frequency.

What is the Floating Weed Manager?

Floating Weed Manager is a web-based tool designed to help water body managers, field surveyors, and biologists monitor and control invasive floating plants. The service supplies weekly maps and metrics of free-floating weeds using a combination of radar and optical images from ESA Sentinel satellites. The maps can be viewed from a user friendly web portal and downloaded using the portal or an API link. The service backdates to 2016 to deliver time-series of maps enabling change and long term trend analysis.

Technical details

Floating Weed Manager supplies up-to-date maps and statistics of floating weed coverage for targeted and timely treatments:

  • Floating weed maps every two-five days, with whole-waterbody cloud-free composite maps every one-two weeks.
  • Total vegetation cover maps every 12 days regardless of cloud cover.
  • 10m spatial resolution and an accuracy of 80% or better.
  • Change maps, summary statistics and time series data from 2016 onwards to evaluate treatment efficiency.
  • Delivery within 48 hours of satellite image acquisition.
  • Mapping of user defined lakes, rivers, and canals (> 10m wide).
  • Data visualisation and download through a user friendly and interactive web portal or API.

Who is this service for?

A service for biologists, field surveyors and water body managers to monitor and control invasive floating plants.

Enquire about a licence

Please contact fwmsupport@ceh.ac.uk to discuss licensing.