Galago by Ramboll

Galago by Ramboll is a geospatial intelligence team within Ramboll, the Danish engineering and consultancy group, that helps landowners, developers and government agencies measure, monitor and manage biodiversity on their land. It grew out of a drone programme that Ramboll's environment and health division started in the USA in 2019.

Galago combines satellite imagery, drone imagery and LiDAR with machine learning to map land cover and habitats, set biodiversity baselines, detect change over time and flag issues such as contamination, erosion or invasive species. Its services are biodiversity impact assessment, baseline mapping and biodiversity monitoring, an environmental digital twin built on its Galago OS data platform, data analysis and visualisation, and reality capture. Archive satellite imagery lets clients review how a site has changed: Ramboll says some of its imagery sources go back to 2003, with fairly consistent coverage from around 2015.

For National Highways in England, Galago built a cloud-optimised pipeline that trained machine-learning habitat models on hundreds of multitemporal satellite images. The result was a prototype that produces network-wide landcover and habitat maps and can be repeated each year to track biodiversity net gain along the strategic road network. Galago's other published projects use drone data: a giant hogweed detection pilot with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and a digital database integration platform for the US Army Corps of Engineers at the Chambers Works remediation site in New Jersey, which combines drone LiDAR and aerial imagery with custom GIS field apps and an Esri web experience. Ramboll reports that it cut report-writing time from three weeks to 24 hours and data-collection time tenfold. Each engagement is tailored to the client's site and run by Galago's own team.