UCalgary entrepreneurs help push boundaries of remote sensing

When Xue Yan Chan started her master's in geography at the University of Calgary in 2022, she figured she’d look for a job with the government or an environmental consultancy after graduation. 

But instead, the grad student has helped launch a startup, Falcon & Swift Geomatics (F&S), and flies a fixed-wing drone across vast swaths of northern Alberta to collect unprecedented amounts of data about seismic lines for commercial customers.

Chan and the F&S team headed to the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range at the end of September for a “beyond visual line-of-sight” drone operation in Alberta’s boreal forest. The company, which uses advanced remote sensing and deep-learning tools, had to apply for permission from Transport Canada because drone regulations require remote aircraft remain within visual sight of the operator. The F&S-operated drone, a Quantum-Systems GmbH Trinity Pro, stays in the air for about 90 minutes at a time.  

“We'll be able to fly it about seven-and-a-half kilometres away from where we're standing,” Chan says. “So, from our one given location, we expect to be able to map on the scale of hundreds of kilometres of seismic lines, which is much more than we were able to do previously. We’re hoping this exemplifies how the research and mapping we do can be used at much greater scale, commercially.”

F&S was born out of the Boreal Ecosystem Recovery and Assessment (BERA) Project, a multi-sectoral research partnership that supports the restoration of Alberta’s boreal forest — critical habitat for threatened woodland caribou and the site of extensive oil-and-gas extraction. BERA aims to understand how seismic lines affect ecosystem dynamics, as well as come up with strategies for restoring the landscape.

“As we're developing technologies and workflows inside the research project, there are people in industry who want to use these tools and workflows,” says Dr. Greg McDermid, BSc'91, MSc'93, PhD, BERA’s principal investigator and professor of geography in the Faculty of Arts. “We've known for some time that an entrepreneurial opportunity would exist. That's the role that Falcon & Swift is playing now.”

BERA postdoctoral fellow Dr. Irina Terenteva, PhD, brought the F&S team together — McDermid, Chan and BERA master's student, Nicole Byford — after participating in e2i: Evolve to Innovate, a UCalgary/Innovate Calgary program that helps scholars evolve research “to solve compelling real-world problems.” 

Prior to launching F&S in the summer of 2024, the team explored potential opportunities, approaching an Indigenous group, a government group, and a private oil and gas company. All three organizations were excited about the idea and interested in hiring the new company to help in their restoration efforts. 

“A sort of ‘restoration economy’ is developing in Western Canada that’s built on the need to restore landscapes that have been disturbed by oil and gas exploration,” says McDermid. “There are just so many seismic lines, over a million kilometres in Alberta alone, so it's a huge challenge just knowing where all the lines are, knowing what features exist on those lines and trying to figure out how to deal with these lines.”

Chan admits working with a startup was “an unexpected opportunity.” But she’s having a lot of fun. 

“It’s the best,” she says. “I've always wanted to work with people who make us greater than the sum of our parts, and that's definitely what I have right now with this team.” Chan has a new postgrad plan — to keep flying drones and helping solve real world problems with Falcon & Swift.