Environmental
Monitoring
Environmental Monitoring area
Environmental professionals including conservationists, researchers, engineers and similar related fields are using fixed-wing drones as an efficient and cost-effective way of capturing accurate environmental data that can be used for various applications. Types of applications include glacial modeling, coastal erosion tracking, species identification and population assessments.
Benefits:
- Efficiency – Gather expansive data quickly over large areas whilst maintaining accuracy and quality.
- Cost savings – Replace expensive manned flights with drones for applications such as animal counting or search and rescue missions.
- Accuracy – UAV or Drone data accuracy is considerably higher than other remote sensing techniques including satellite data.
- High-resolution data – Environmental applications rely on understanding change and the variables affecting change, something that drone data equipped with cameras detailing high temporal, spatial and spectral resolution help achieve.
Applications:
- Vegetation monitoring – Assess and measure vegetation health, canopy cover, calculate biomass, identify disease and other threats, and monitor growth stages throughout the seasons.
- Plant and animal counting – Capture high spatial and spectral resolution data to count plants and animals, either manually or with automated machine learning.
- Species identification – Identify and categorize vegetation according to species and other metrics, identify invasive species and plan corrective actions.
- Water management – Understand landscape contours and soil properties to manage water flow, flooding and irrigation, or detect algae blooms in water bodies.
- Risk management – Map fire breaks, erosion, landscape changes and encroachment.
- Progress monitoring – Monitor and track project progress and reporting, quickly generate area and volume reports and quantify costs.
- Land management – Map and manage land to optimize biodiversity, minimize risk, monitor land changes and degradation, and plan interventions early with a comprehensive understanding of the context.
- Search and rescue – Fixed-wing drones can cover large areas in short times, making them useful for search and rescue missions in national parks.
Outputs (depending on payload sensor selected):
- Orthomosaic map – A geospatially accurate and detailed 2D representation of a site. Accurate orthomosaic maps help environmentalists monitor change and extract insights such as species counts, encroachment and other aspects.
- Index maps – Combine multispectral indices for detailed vegetation, soil and water analyses, including Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), NDRE which is sensitive to chlorophyll content in leaves and can also be used for mapping variability in fertilizer requirements, Color Infrared Composites, and OSAVI (Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index) maps.
- Digital Surface Model (DSM) – DSMs depict elevation and are useful in water management and soil monitoring applications.
- 3D mesh map – A three-dimensional texture (mesh) map with X, Y, Z data can be used for cluster analyses or to characterize vegetation and erosion.
- Point clouds – Point cloud maps comprise millions of individual points featuring X, Y, Z geospatial coordinates and with associated RGB/multispectral values, and can be used in biomass measurements and planning/calculating restoration costs.
- Contour lines – Topographic maps take X and Y coordinates from the aerial drone data to generate precise contour intervals to understand the lay of the land and landscape dynamics.
A variety of software is available for flight planning, image stitching and processing. FalconUAV can assist you in your goals to determine the right UAV is selected for your requirements.
