Drones Save Time, Money for Rainforest Rehab

Our rainforests are in trouble and drones could be use to help fix the problem.

According to a recent study published in Biological Conservation, researchers have discovered that deploying lightweight UAVs to monitor tropical forest regeneration results in accurate data on par with costlier and more time-intensive methods.

“It’s early days but drones have great potential for monitoring restoration efforts in tropical forests,” lead co-author Rakan Zahawi told PhysOrg. “We’ve shown that using drones to replace manual labor can reduce the costs associated with monitoring conservation projects. This could result in more people monitoring their land in the tropics, giving us better information about what works and what doesn’t,” he added.

The research team, representing the Organization for Tropical Studies, University of Maryland, University of California-Santa Cruz and the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, used a PixHawk/ArduPilot drone solution dubbed “Ecosynth” to measure forest canopy structure in southern Costa Rica following a 7–9-year tropical forest restoration study. Ecosynth combined aerial images from consumer-grade digital cameras with computer vision software to generate 3D “point cloud” models of vegetation at high spatial resolutions.

“Traditional field-based measures for assessing forest recovery and habitat quality can be labor intensive and costly,” the study notes. “Here we assess whether remote sensing measurements from lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles are a cost-effective substitute for traditional field measures.”

Forest restoration efforts are a key ingredient in patching up the man-made damage inflicted on tropical rainforests usually by over-farming. PhysOrg noted that “between 1990 and 2005, the world’s rainforests were depleted by more than 8 percent through deforestation, in part to make way for agriculture.”

The study concludes that drones provide “provides an effective alternate methodology to traditional field-based measures of evaluating forest structure and complexity across landscapes.”

“Furthermore, given the volume of data that can be generated in a single flight plan, as well as the ability to use the technology in remote areas, these methods could expand the scope of studies on forest dynamics and recovery when combined with field-based calibration plots.”