In 2026, the Leningrad Region will launch a digital service that will allow residents to report hogweed thickets and monitor the progress of work to destroy it. This instruction was given by Governor Alexander Drozdenko. The total amount of funding to combat the dangerous weed this year will amount to 49.5 million rubles, with an additional 6.1 million rubles allocated from the regional budget.
We need a unified system for managing this process in order to control all stages [...]. A clear digital service should be created so that any citizen can send a photo of where hogweed grows, with its location attached. Otherwise, it won't work.
At the same time, Yandex has already launched a free AI service for detecting hogweed in satellite images. The technology works on the basis of computer vision and speeds up the marking of infected areas by 50 times compared to manual processing. The service, developed by the School of Data Analysis in collaboration with the StopBorshhevik movement, helped volunteers identify foci of weed growth on an area of 421 hectares in 17 regions of the European part of Russia. In Moscow and the Moscow region, the entire territory was analyzed with its help.
