On the Use of Unmanned Aerial Systems for Environmental Monitoring
By S. Manfreda, Matthew F. McCabe, P. Miller, R. Lucas, Victor Pajuelo Madrigal, Giorgos Mallinis, E. Ben-Dor, D. Helman, L. Estes, G. Ciraolo and 13 more. Remote Sensing, 2018
675 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Environmental monitoring plays a central role in diagnosing climate and management impacts on natural and agricultural systems; enhancing the understanding of hydrological processes; optimizing the allocation and distribution of water resources; and assessing, forecasting, and even preventing natural disasters. Nowadays, most monitoring and data collection systems are based upon a combination of ground-based measurements, manned airborne sensors, and satellite observations. These data are utilized in describing both small- and large-scale processes, but have spatiotemporal constraints inherent to each respective collection system. Bridging the unique spatial and temporal divides that limit current monitoring platforms is key to improving our understanding of environmental systems. In this context, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) have considerable potential to radically improve environmental monitoring. UAS-mounted sensors offer an extraordinary opportunity to bridge the existing gap between field observations and traditional air- and space-borne remote sensing, by providing high spatial detail over relatively large areas in a cost-effective way and an entirely new capacity for enhanced temporal retrieval. As well as showcasing recent advances in the field, there is also a need to identify and understand the potential limitations of UAS technology. For these platforms to reach their monitoring potential, a wide spectrum of unresolved issues and application-specific challenges require focused community attention. Indeed, to leverage the full potential of UAS-based approaches, sensing technologies, measurement protocols, postprocessing techniques, retrieval algorithms, and evaluation techniques need to be harmonized. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the existing research and applications of UAS in natural and agricultural ecosystem monitoring in order to identify future directions, applications, developments, and challenges.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02c3d1c42682a61270cecc434f5d1588fb851ff7
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Citations in the corpus
- Vegetation monitoring using multispectral sensors – best practices and lessons learned from high latitudes (2018, background): “Despite the increased presence of drone-sensor derived products in the published literature, standardized protocols and best practices for fine-grain, multispectral drone-based mapping have yet to be developed by the ecological research community (Manfreda et al. 2018).”
- A compilation of UAV applications for precision agriculture (2020, neutral): “On the contrary to the previous references, other papers [19–23] follow a more specific approach by examining the contribution of UAVs in regards to the agricultural domain.”