The rapid technological advances in
drone technology, together with their affordability and ease of customization,
has made them an increasingly important tool for scientists studying wildlife
and the environment. Rhode Island researchers are taking advantage of them for
such wide-ranging uses as monitoring algae blooms, assessing forest damage
following storms, and creating high-resolution maps of the landscape.
Paolo Stegagno, a new engineering
professor at the University of Rhode Island, worries that some people may think
that drones are the solution to every problem, and he is skeptical
that they
will be effective at delivering packages or pizzas, as some companies claim.
 |
| URI engineer Paolo Stegagno and his drone (Nora Lewis) |
“But there are some tasks that
drones are really useful for, tasks in which you have to reach someplace that
has difficult terrain to go over or could be dangerous for people,” he said.
“They can also collect a lot of data that is difficult to collect otherwise,
like infrared imagery or thermal information from wildfires or from people in
distress. If you select the right sensor for a specific task, you can get a
better point of view of what’s going on.”
Stegagno is working with scientists in
three other states to collect data about how algae blooms develop in lakes in
an effort to better predict when they might occur. That data will be shared
with the Watershed Watch program, which tracks water quality in most of Rhode
Island’s water bodies.
“We don’t really have any real
knowledge of what actually triggers the blooms, so we can’t predict them now,”
he said. “We plan to put drones in the air and surface vehicles on the water to
collect data using specific bands of light to determine the factors driving the
blooms.”
The project will begin this spring
by monitoring algae blooms in Barber Pond and Yawgoo Pond in South Kingstown.
Jason Parent, another new URI
professor, is using drones to map forest characteristics like canopy density
and tree mortality and to measure stem density and diameter.
“These are characteristics of a
forest that indicate forest health and tree risk to infrastructure, when
they’re more vulnerable to failure during storms,” he said. “I’m using that
data to help better manage the roadside forest, to reduce risk so we can invest
resources in the most beneficial treatments.”
The objective is to help utility
companies and municipalities identify trees that are a threat to power lines
and other infrastructure so they may be trimmed or removed before the trees
fall. Parent is working with colleagues at the University of Connecticut and
Connecticut utilities on a vegetation management program to manage the forest
within 100 feet of the roadside by removing unhealthy trees. He hopes to
initiate a similar project with National Grid in Rhode Island.
“It’s an intense program, so it
needs to be targeted where it can have the biggest impact, and drones help to
identify priority areas,” he said. “Drones are limited by their battery power
and other restrictions, so we use them to calibrate data collected by planes.
The airborne data has lots of information, but it’s hard to interpret and you
can’t get to the same level of detail as you can with drones. So we’re using
drones to ground-truth the airborne data.”
Parent is also beginning a project
to use drones to map the inside of buildings to create indoor navigation
systems for first responders.
At the URI Environmental Data Center, which creates ecological maps of the entire state for a wide variety of
environmental applications, drones are being used to create high-resolution
imagery for use in classifying habitats and land cover.
“We’re hoping drones will allow us
to image over smaller areas and capture much more precise information at times
of the year when we can call the shots and not have to wait for the state’s periodic
overflights,” said Charles LaBash, director of the center, who notes that the
Rhode Island Department of Transportation collects aerial photography of the
state by conventional aircraft three times each year to support its stormwater
management efforts and other projects. “If something is happening now, we can
go up and mobilize relatively quickly. That’s the advantage of drones.”
For instance, staff at the
Environmental Data Center are using drones to monitor the progress of several
efforts by the Coastal Resources Management Council, Save the Bay and others to
raise the elevation of salt marshes that are threatened by rising sea levels
and storm surge.
“Drones give us a way to monitor the
success of the vegetation that’s taking root out there,” LaBash said. “You can
look at it with your eyes, but having that imagery gives you a consistent way
to document the geospatial position and extent of revegetated areas.”
When conditions are right, the
center is also using drones to look into the water in the state’s coastal ponds
to map the location of eelgrass beds. It also has used its drones to test
equipment used by other researchers that detects migratory birds flying by the
Block Island wind farm, among other projects.
“There are many other possible uses
of drones that we’re just beginning to think about,” said Stegagno, the URI
engineering professor, “like monitoring wide areas for early detection of
wildfires or for use in precision agriculture, where you collect data from
crops to figure out whether your plants are in distress. All you have to do is
customize them with the right sensors.”
No comments:
Post a Comment