Invasive weed African lovegrass is a "beast" farmers in the NSW Snowy Monaro region have been battling for more than a century, the council's biosecurity co-ordinator Brett Jones says.
"Lovegrass really takes over. Nothing competes with it," Mr Jones told AAP.
"People spend their lives just trying to keep on top of this stuff ... it overwhelms people."
The weed, which was accidentally introduced in Australia before 1900, challenges farmers worldwide because it has a quick seeding cycle, flourishes in both wet and dry conditions and spreads rapidly.
It can quickly invade and choke native pastures, provides limited nutrition for cattle and sheep and becomes a serious bushfire risk when it dries out.
Part of the battle is understanding the scale of the weed's invasion because "lovegrass is a grass hiding in grass", Mr Jones said.
So researchers have begun trialling the use of satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to monitor the spread of both lovegrass and another noxious weed, bitou bush.
One algorithm detected African lovegrass with 89.8 per cent accuracy and 86.1 per cent for bitou bush, a yellow-flowering coastal weed, according to the study published in the science journal Weed Research.
Charles Darwin University spatial analyst and researcher Glen Shennan said satellites provided a greater view of the weed invasion than drones, taking photographs from 700km away.
The SkySat satellites took photos of the regions every six days and could provide a decade's worth of imagery to illustrate how the landscape had changed.
"It's an enormous amount of money that lovegrass costs Australia each year," Mr Shennan said.
"By being able to direct control mitigation efforts and, in particular, the early intervention efforts, you could really hope to claw back a significant fraction of that."
Managing all invasive plants costs Australia more than $4 billion a year, as lovegrass also develops resistance to herbicides.
Mr Shennan said while the research was in its early days, the technology held promise.
"Lovegrass is a particularly tenacious weed, so you have to manage your expectations a little bit," he said
"But there's a lot of benefit that could be derived economically from this work."
Mr Jones said all research into managing lovegrass was welcome but there appeared to be no silver bullet in the pipeline.
Lovegrass was best controlled on arable land where it can be successfully overrun by crops but management continued to hit farmers' hip pockets.
"What we've done for the last 50 years hasn't been working," Mr Jones said.
"It's just getting out of control and taking over the place."
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