Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to capture micro-topography of Antarctic moss beds
By Arko Lucieer, Darren Turner, Diana H. King, Sharon A. Robinson. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 2014
295 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Mosses, the dominant flora of East Antarctica, show evidence of drying in recent decades, likely due to the regional effects of climate change. Given the relatively small area that such moss beds occupy, new tools are needed to map and monitor these fragile ecosystems in sufficient detail. In this study, we collected low altitude aerial photography with a small multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Structure from Motion (SfM) computer vision techniques were applied to derive ultra-high resolution 3D models from multi-view aerial photography. A 2 cm digital surface model (DSM) and 1 cm orthophoto mosaic were derived from the 3D model and aerial photographs, respectively. The geometric accuracy of the orthophoto and DSM was 4 cm. A weighted contributing upstream area was derived with the D-infinity algorithm, based on the DSM and a snow cover map derived from the orthophoto. The contributing upstream area was used as a proxy for water availability from snowmelt, one of the key environmental drivers of moss health. A Monte Carlo simulation with 300 realisations was implemented to model the impact of error in the DSM on runoff direction. Significant correlations were found between these simulated water availability values and field measurements of moss health and water content. In the future ultra-high spatial resolution DSMs acquired with a UAV could thus be used to determine the impact of changing snow cover on the health and spatial distribution of polar vegetation non-destructively.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecological Modeling, Ecology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0e9d40d8e91565140d0b3ddd757c1d7c05bb5f5
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atmospheric Science
In Ecological Modeling
- Katarzyna Dziób
- Miranda C. Jones
- Nathalie Pettorelli
- M. Nowak
- M. McGeoch
- M. Böhm
- Z. Malenovsky
- Mark John Costello
In Ecology
- Katarzyna Dziób
- J. Belnap
- Miranda C. Jones
- Nathalie Pettorelli
- Mark W. Smith
- Christos Arvanitidis
- Darren Turner
- Duncan Quincey
Citations in the corpus
- Structure from motion photogrammetry in physical geography (2016, methodology): “There has been a proliferation in low-cost airborne platforms in recent years; unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used extensively for acquisition of SfM-MVS imagery (e.g. Lucieer et al., 2014; Tonkin et al., 2014; Woodget et al., 2014).”
- Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environmental biology: a review (2019, background): “Despite the substantial decrease in operation time, the authors were able to successfully collect low-altitude aerial photographs to map moss beds, the dominant plant in East Antarctica.”
- Estimating Biomass of Barley Using Crop Surface Models (CSMs) Derived from UAV-Based RGB Imaging (2014, unknown): “01-m resolution *TIF-file (Figure 2; [38,39]).”
- Assessment of Forest Structure Using Two UAV Techniques: A Comparison of Airborne Laser Scanning and Structure from Motion (SfM) Point Clouds (2016, methodology): “ The mini‐UAV system used in this study was designed to accommodate the laser scanner and the DSLR camera simultaneously.”
- Building capacity in biodiversity monitoring at the global scale (2017, background): “Cameras may also be used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), as used to investigate Antarctic moss beds (Lucieer et al. 2014).”