Drones New Tool for Research
Ambience: UAV Drone Launch
A UAS or Unmanned Aerial System is a kind of drone and it’s helping scientists do research in ways that were never before possible. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
McGee: One huge advantage of drones is data on demand. And that’s something that you just can’t get through the traditional means of capturing imagery. If we had the right permissions, we could go out and launch our drone and capture imagery today.
John McGee is a geospatial extension specialist in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech.
McGee: You can fly low with a drone. That enables you to collect data that has very high resolution, so you can capture information about the terrain that you might not be able to see with an aircraft that has to fly much higher.
So there’s a lot of application areas that drones can support. Disaster management and mitigation is probably high on the list. In the event of a tornado or a hurricane or a flood, it’s often difficult to get into an area. You can send the drone and there determine which roads been washed out, what the impacts are, and how best to mitigate these circumstances.
In agriculture you can use a drone to assess crop health. This can be done using sensors that can see things that we can’t see with our naked eyes. For example, there is a near infrared sensor. This sensor is able to detect vegetation vigor. Thus, if the vegetation is stressed, due to a total lack of water or due to a lack of nutrients or pests, than the sensor can pick this up long before we can see the effects of this with our with our own eyes. And therefore farmers are able to mitigate these impacts long before the damage to the crop is too far along.
We’ll hear more about drones in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. You can hear this and previous programs on our podcast.