A year on from the devastating fires at Tongariro National Park, drone imagery, remote sensing and artificial intelligence are helping the Department of Conservation monitor recovery and target threats across the affected landscape.
In November 2025, fire swept through around 3,000 hectares of tussock grassland and regenerating alpine scrub in Tongariro National Park. A second, smaller fire followed a month later, adding further damage to an already sensitive landscape.
A year later, natural regeneration is underway, with red tussock, flax and other vegetation beginning to return. However, recovery is not simply a matter of waiting for the landscape to regenerate. Preventing invasive weeds and pest animals from establishing in the fire-affected area is an important part of giving native vegetation the best opportunity to recover.
For Interpine, this has created an opportunity to apply technologies we regularly use across forestry and environmental monitoring to a very different challenge: helping understand and support the recovery of one of New Zealand’s most significant landscapes.
From emergency response to long-term recovery
Interpine’s involvement began during the fires themselves.
Our Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Dave Herries, was involved in the firefighting response as a volunteer, leading an intelligence team that utilised Fire and Emergency New Zealand drones to identify hotspots and provide information to firefighters on the ground during the initial attack and mop up.
Once the immediate fire response was over, the role of the technology shifted from emergency response to recovery and monitoring.
Interpine returned to capture detailed aerial imagery of the fire ground, providing a snapshot of the landscape following the fire. Since then, repeat surveys have been undertaken to build a visual record of how the affected area is changing over time. Three large aerial surveys had been completed by the time of the RNZ story, with another planned for December.
This repeat monitoring provides much more than photographs. It creates a spatial record that can be used to observe regeneration, identify emerging threats and help land managers understand where intervention may be required.
Using AI to find the weeds that matter
One of the challenges following a large fire is the potential for invasive species to establish within the disturbed landscape.
Working with the Department of Conservation, Interpine is using drone imagery and AI-based analysis to help identify gorse, broom and wilding conifers across the affected area.
Rather than sending people or helicopters out to systematically search thousands of hectares, high-resolution imagery can be captured across the landscape and analysed to identify likely individual plants.
Those locations can then be provided to DOC staff and contractors, allowing ground teams to focus their effort where it is needed.
As Dave Herries explained to RNZ, when a fire ground extends across more than 3,000 hectares, being able to locate weeds precisely can help optimise the use of limited resources on the ground.
It is a practical example of how drones, remote sensing, AI and field operations can work together. The technology does not replace the expertise of the people managing the land. Instead, it helps them make better use of their time by providing better information about where to look and where to act.
Watching a landscape recover
There is also a longer-term value in the imagery being collected.
Repeated surveys allow the same landscape to be observed at different points in time, creating a valuable record of post-fire change and natural regeneration.
This type of monitoring is increasingly important for environmental management. Remote sensing makes it possible to repeatedly measure large and sometimes difficult-to-access areas, while advances in AI allow increasingly large imagery datasets to be analysed efficiently.
For Interpine, the Tongariro work demonstrates how technologies developed and used within forestry can also contribute to conservation, biosecurity, wildfire response and landscape-scale environmental monitoring.
Most importantly, though, the story is about recovery.
A year after the fires, signs of regeneration are becoming visible across the landscape. The challenge now is to give that natural recovery the best possible chance of succeeding.
We are proud to be working alongside the Department of Conservation and others involved in that effort, applying technology in a practical way to help protect and understand this remarkable environment.
Read the full RNZ story:
Drones, AI helping Tongariro National Park regeneration efforts after destructive fires