Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) is tapping into a new range of skills and expertise as part of its efforts to find hi-tech solutions to the practical and logistical issues in forestry practice.

FLS's fourth collaboration with CivTech aims to improve the effectiveness of wildlife management and has set the challenge of developing new technological approaches to wildlife tracking in the rugged Scottish landscape.

For the Exploration Stage FLS has selected four companies to develop their applications for the challenge and bringing to bear their experience from the aerospace, digital mapping, computing and forestry sectors.

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The four companies are:

• BH Wildlife Consultancy | Drone services

• 2Excel Aviation. An Aviation and Aerospace Services Business

• spotta.co/forestry

• EOLAS - Ecological land data management - animal species count services (eolasinsight.com)

Project Manager for FLS, Veronica Lyne-Pirkis, said: "The great thing about working with CivTech is that we are able to access a phenomenal range of expertise that we might otherwise not engage with.

"Bringing fresh eyes and different ways of thinking to a problem are usually very effective ways of finding solutions to those problems.

"We are very excited that our innovation journey continues to re-shape modern forestry and we are looking forward to seeing what ideas these four companies develop."

FLS has opted to work with four companies, instead of the more usual three, in order to fully explore all of the innovative ideas that have been put forward.

Part of the CivTech Round 9, FLS's project is worth up to £650,000 and is part funded through CivTech's Innovate for Nature initiative.

Full details of the Challenge can be found on the CivTech Scotland website.