Drones Software Package
Drones now carry enough sophisticated software and sensors to give scientists an unprecedented bird’s eye view of our environment. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
McGee: There are individuals that want to assess nesting sites. And of course in the past, that’s involved climbing up on to the side of a cliff and peering into a nest.
Geospatial extension specialist John McGee.
McGee: Now we can do that with the drone and we can do that in a way that’s not as obtrusive. There’s also invasive species mapping, forest mapping, forest inventories, watershed mapping.
We can identify stresses to forests, not only to a forest but certain trees within the forest. These stresses could be caused by pest issues, a deficit of water.
We’re also interested in wildlife inventories, endangered species mapping, habitat assessments,watershed analysis. Now using a drone, we can look at turbidity patterns in the water. With a thermal sensor we can look at how the temperature of the water might change over time and where this temperature change is deriving from. Is it deriving from parking lots, industrial sources, or is it a natural occurrence?
Drone not only take pictures, but their software collates and interprets them.
McGee: As it moves down the flight pat, it takes a picture every few hundred feet. And so after the drone landed, you would have obviously a collection of potentially several thousand images. The post-processing software helps to stitch these together and create a seamless aerial photograph. So it’s basically an aerial image, but it’s also a map. You can conduct fairly accurate measurements using this imagery.
Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by Virginia Tech, inventing the future through a hands on approach to education and research.