Surveillance

Under our Fire Ant Response Plan 2023–27, we will stop the spread of fire ants by conducting surveillance activities around the outside of the infestation.

Our current surveillance area forms a ring around the known fire ant infestation, spanning from Moreton Bay to the Lockyer Valley and down to the Tweed Shire.

Fire ant surveillance is completed:

• year-round, with an intensive period of work done in the cooler months (when fire ants nests are more visible)
• on targeted properties and in areas recognised as ideal habitat for fire ants
• by trained field officers, odour detection dogs and aircraft with specialist technology
• at regular intervals throughout the year and for 5 years post eradication treatment
• to determine the presence or absence of fire ants (PDF, 820.1KB) in areas.

The surveillance activities we complete in response to outlier detections are different.

Aerial surveillance

We use new and improved remote sensing technology to help us look for fire ant nests.

This technology, which consists of multispectral cameras mounted to a helicopter, scans the landscape for fire ant nests. It is not used anywhere else in the world.

Our helicopters fly at an altitude of 750 feet (230m).

During our remote sensing flights, we capture long and shortwave infrared and near-infrared images, and standard imagery from the visual spectrum (red, green, blue). The combination of these image types allows us to capture important details that cannot be seen with the naked eye alone, including the heat signature of fire ant nests.

We then analyse the images using an artificial intelligence algorithm to determine what could be a fire ant nest that is then validated by our teams.

Identifying small points in a large and complex image is difficult, and the AI sometimes provides 'false positive' results. These results are important as they will help us improve our surveillance methods and provide us with confidence that an area is free of fire ants.