UAV applications in forest monitoring

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), sometimes called drones, become more and more relevant for forest monitoring. Together with fast developments of photogrammetry software and the increasing availability of specific sensors, UAVs become a flexible alternative for airborne remote sensing on smaller areas.
Together with my colleagues Dr. Hans Fuchs, Dr. Nils Nölke and Nils Griese, we give an overview about some typical goals and products that are interesting in context of forest monitoring and forest management.
If you are interested about other aspects of forest inventories or remote sensing applications in forestry, visit our AWF Wiki at wiki.awf.forst....
#unigöttingen
#forestinventory
#forestmensuration

[@catherinenjeri5637]

Super nice and easy explanation!

[@adamalex7402]

Very cool and great work! I am just starting off and until I get my first jobs I am using the free Open Drone map. Which one did you use?

[@alfredounda2245]

Very Interesting presentation. I am a partially retired forester and live in a mountain community of around 3000 hectares in central Chile. We need to evaluate fuel concentration in areas covered by sclerophyllous’ forest and xerophytic vegetation as fuel for potential wildfire events. I would appreciate recommendations on the type of drone, equipment and computer program required to carry out some flights to allow us to measure fuel concentrations, especially in the driest areas of the vegetation cover, to improve forest fire prevention.

[@forestinventory]

In this video we are presenting a photogrammetric workflow, where we derive 3D point clouds from matching aerial images. The disadvantage for your application is that we are not able to penetrate the canopy (points and surfaces can only be generated from what you see from above). Fuel load is probably a matter of dry biomass in lower canopies or close to the ground. In this case an active sensor (LiDAR) would be the better (but also much more expensive, the LiDAR sensor alone is >50k USD) solution, since you can get reflections from below the upper canopy that allow estimating the vegetation density below the upper canopy. Such sensors are available for the drone that was used here and we are using a LiDAR sensor with a newer version of this system. The drone used here is a Quantum Systems Trinity F90 and the software used for flight planning is the companies own QBase Mission planning. But be aware that such a system equipped with a LiDAR sensor comes with a decent price... (>130k USD). In this price range it only makes sense for large scale and continuous applications to pay off. For larger areas airborne LiDAR scanning with an airplane might be more cost efficient...

[@OpenCanopy]

Thanks for this, good video with key information. Would be glad to see more on the processing of the data and any tips or tricks for a good workflow for forestry (as opposed to multispectral and the agriculture uses)! Cheers

[@eduardohildt]

An excellent video, summarizing very well the potential of drone photogrammetry applied to the study of forests. Greetings from Argentina, where we are working on this issue, although at the moment using "toy drones". ; )

[@forestinventory]

"toy drones" are very useful, cheap and flexible and equipped with very good cameras today. Have fun!