When your interest is in plant ecology, there may be areas you cannot or must not go due to the impact to that environment simply from your intrusion. Enter the micro drones and you have ecological survey tools with almost no impact and these can provide a substantial benefit to the study of plant science. (Science Daily: Drones take off in plant ecological research)
Long-term, broad-scale ecological data are critical to plant research, but often impossible to collect on foot. Traditional data-collection methods can be time consuming or dangerous, and can compromise habitats that are sensitive to human impact. Micro-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, eliminate these data-collection pitfalls by flying over landscapes to gather unobtrusive aerial image data.
This is a digital surface model of the vernal pool region of the Whetstone Savanna Preserve in southern Oregon generated from aerial images collected using a small drone.
Credit: Mitchell B. Cruzan, Ben G. Weinstein, Monica R. Grasty, Brendan F. Kohrn, Elizabeth C. Hendrickson, Tina M. Arredondo, and Pamela G. Thompson. 2016. Small unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs, drones) in plant ecology. Applications in Plant Sciences 4(9)
To test the effectiveness of drones, Cruzan and colleagues applied drone technology to a landscape genetics study of the Whetstone Savanna Preserve in southern Oregon, USA. "Our goal is to understand how landscape features affect pollen and seed dispersal for plant species associated with different dispersal vectors," says Cruzan. They flew drones over vernal pools, which are threatened, seasonal wetlands. They analyzed the drone images to identify how landscape features mediate gene flow and plant dispersal in these patchy habitats. Mapping these habitats manually would have taken hundreds of hours and compromised these ecologically sensitive areas.
Long-term, broad-scale ecological data are critical to plant research, but often impossible to collect on foot. Traditional data-collection methods can be time consuming or dangerous, and can compromise habitats that are sensitive to human impact. Micro-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, eliminate these data-collection pitfalls by flying over landscapes to gather unobtrusive aerial image data.
- Science Daily
Note to Scientists: you do not 'gather unobtrusive aerial image data' but rather you 'unobtrusively gather aerial image data' and, amazingly enough, the words do make a difference.
Ed: you are one nitpicking bitch!
It's science, man. It's not just my job, it's semantic ping pong.
Ed: you don't have a job!
See, there you go always sucking the life and the joy out of the Universe, Moriarty.
Herewith, some unobtrusive aerial image data:
Credit: Mitchell B. Cruzan, Ben G. Weinstein, Monica R. Grasty, Brendan F. Kohrn, Elizabeth C. Hendrickson, Tina M. Arredondo, and Pamela G. Thompson. 2016. Small unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs, drones) in plant ecology. Applications in Plant Sciences 4(9)
- Science Daily.
That doesn't look so spectacular here at the Rockhouse but it reveals a great deal to the plant scientists, information which would have been much more difficult to obtain any other way.
- Science Daily
There you have it, possibly the first use of a drone for anything approaching a practical reason and the scientists appear well satisfied with the result.
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