Archive for the ‘Drones’ Category
To Take Earth’s Pulse, You Have To Fly High
October 25th, 2015
Courtesy of National Geographic, an interesting article on the use of satellite and airborne sensors to assess the environment:
The view out the window was bad enough. As his research plane flew over groves of California’s giant sequoias, some of the world’s tallest trees, Greg Asner could see the toll the state’s four-year drought had taken. “It looked wicked dry down there,” he said. But when he turned from the window to the video display in his flying lab, the view was even more alarming. In places, the forest was bright red. “It was showing shocking levels of stress,” he said.
The digital images were coming from a new 3-D scanning system that Asner, an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution for Science, had just installed in his turboprop aircraft. The scanner’s twin lasers pinged the trees, picking out individual branches from 7,000 feet up. Its twin imaging spectrometers, one built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), recorded hundreds of wavelengths of reflected sunlight, from the visible to the infrared, revealing detailed chemical signatures that identified each tree by species and even showed how much water it had absorbed—a key indicator of health. “It was like getting a blood test of the whole forest,” Asner said. The way he had chosen the display colors that day, trees starved of water were bright red.
Disturbing as the images were, they represented a powerful new way of looking at the planet. “The system produces maps that tell us more about an ecosystem in a single airborne overpass,” Asner wrote later, “than what might be achieved in a lifetime of work on the ground.” And his Carnegie Airborne Observatory is just the leading edge of a broader trend.
A half century after the first weather satellite sent back fuzzy pictures of clouds swirling over the North Atlantic, advanced sensors are doing for scientists what medical scanners have done for doctors—giving them ever improving tools to track Earth’s vital signs. In 2014 and early 2015 NASA launched five major Earth-observing missions (including two new instruments on the space station), bringing its total to 19. Space agencies from Brazil, China, Europe, and elsewhere have joined in. “There’s no question we’re in a golden age for remote sensing,” said Michael Freilich, NASA’s earth science director.
Four years of drought have taken a harsh toll on California’s farms and forests. Last spring Greg Asner and his team flew over the Sierra Nevada, home to sequoias and other giant trees. With the new instruments on their airplane, the researchers completed in days a damage survey that would have taken a lifetime from the ground.The news from all these eyes in the sky, it has to be said, is mostly not good. They bear witness to a world in the midst of rapid changes, from melting glaciers and shrinking rain forests to rising seas and more. But at a time when human impacts on Earth are unprecedented, the latest sensors offer an unprecedented possibility to monitor and understand the impacts—not a cure for what ails the planet, but at least a better diagnosis. That in itself is a hopeful thing.
In California the water crisis has turned the state into something of a laboratory for remote-sensing projects. For the past three years a NASA team led by Tom Painter has been flying an instrument-packed aircraft over Yosemite National Park to measure the snowpack that feeds the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the primary source of water for San Francisco.
Until now, reservoir managers have estimated the amount of snow on surrounding peaks the old-fashioned way, using a few gauges and taking surveys on foot. They fed these data into a statistical model that forecast spring runoff based on historical experience. But lately, so little snow had fallen in the Sierra Nevada that history could offer no analogues. So Chris Graham, a water operations analyst at Hetch Hetchy, accepted the NASA scientists’ offer to measure the snowpack from the sky.
Painter’s Twin Otter aircraft, called the Airborne Snow Observatory, was equipped with a package of sensors similar to those in Greg Asner’s plane: a scanning lidar to measure the snow’s depth and an imaging spectrometer to analyze its properties. Lidar works like radar but with laser light, determining the plane’s distance to the snow from the time it takes the light to bounce back. By comparing snow-covered terrain with the same topography scanned on a snow-free summer day, Painter and his team could repeatedly measure exactly how much snow there was in the entire 460-square-mile watershed. Meanwhile the imaging spectrometer was revealing how big the snow grains were and how much dust was on the surface—both of which affect how quickly the snow will melt in the spring sun and produce runoff. “That’s data we’ve never had before,” Graham said.
Painter also has been tracking shrinking snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains, which supply water to millions of people across the Southwest. Soon he plans to bring his technology to other mountainous regions around the world where snow-fed water supplies are at risk, such as the Himalayan watersheds of the Indus and Ganges Rivers. “By the end of the decade, nearly two billion people will be affected by changes in snowpacks,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest stories of climate change.”
With less water flowing into California’s rivers and reservoirs, officials have cut back on the amount of water supplied to the state’s farmers, who typically produce about half the fruits, nuts, and vegetables grown in the U.S. In response, growers have been pumping more water from wells to irrigate fields, causing water tables to fall. State officials normally monitor underground water supplies by lowering sensors into wells. But a team of scientists led by Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine, and at JPL, has been working with a pair of satellites called GRACE (for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) to “weigh” California’s groundwater from space.
The satellites do this by detecting how changes in the pull of Earth’s gravity alter the height of the satellites and the distance between them. “Say we’re flying over the Central Valley,” Famiglietti said, holding a cell phone in each hand and moving them overhead like one satellite trailing the other. “There’s a certain amount of water down there, which is heavy, and it pulls the first satellite away from the other.”
The GRACE satellites can measure that to within 1/25,000 of an inch. And a year later, after farmers have pumped more water out of the ground, and the pull on the first satellite has been ever so slightly diminished, the GRACE satellites will be able to detect that change too.
Depletion of the world’s aquifers, which supply at least one-third of humanity’s water, has become a serious danger, Famiglietti said. GRACE data show that more than half the world’s largest aquifers are being drained faster than they can refill, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, India, Pakistan, and North Africa.
Since California’s drought began in 2011, the state has been losing about four trillion gallons a year (more than three and a half cubic miles) from the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Basins, Famiglietti said. That’s more than the annual consumption of the state’s cities and towns. About two-thirds of the lost water has come from aquifers in the Central Valley, where pumping has caused another problem: Parts of the valley are sinking.
Tom Farr, a geologist at JPL, has been mapping this subsidence with radar data from a Canadian satellite orbiting some 500 miles up. The technique he used, originally developed to study earthquakes, can detect land deformations as small as an inch or two. Farr’s maps have shown that in places, the Central Valley has been sinking by around a foot a year.
One of those places was a small dam near the city of Los Banos that diverts water to farms in the area. “We knew there was a problem with the dam, because water was starting to flow up over its sides,” said Cannon Michael, president of Bowles Farming Company. “It wasn’t until we got the satellite data that we saw how huge the problem was.” Two sunken bowls had formed across a total of 3,600 square miles of farmland, threatening dams, bridges, canals, pipelines, and floodways—millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. In late 2014 California governor Jerry Brown signed the state’s first law phasing in restrictions on groundwater removal.
As evidence has mounted about Earth’s maladies—from rising temperatures and ocean acidification to deforestation and extreme weather—NASA has given priority to missions aimed at coping with the impacts. One of its newest satellites, a $916 million observatory called SMAP (for Soil Moisture Active Passive), was launched in January. It was designed to measure soil moisture both by bouncing a radar beam off the surface and by recording radiation emitted by the soil itself. In July the active radar stopped transmitting, but the passive radiometer is still doing its job. Its maps will help scientists forecast droughts, floods, crop yields, and famines.
“If we’d had SMAP data in 2012, we easily could have forecast the big Midwest drought that took so many people by surprise,” said Narendra N. Das, a research scientist at JPL. Few people expected the region to lose about $30 billion worth of crops that summer from a “flash drought”—a sudden heat wave combined with unusually low humidity. “SMAP data could have shown early on that the region’s soil moisture was already depleted and that if rains didn’t come, then crops were going to fail,” Das said. Farmers might not have bet so heavily on a bumper crop.
Climate change also is increasing the incidence of extreme rains—and SMAP helps with that risk too. It can tell officials when the ground has become so saturated that a landslide or a downstream flood is imminent. But too little water is a more pervasive and lasting threat. Without moisture in the soil, a healthy environment breaks down, as it has in California, leading to heat waves, drought, and wildfires. “Soil moisture is like human sweat,” Das said. “When it evaporates, it has a cooling effect. But when the soil is devoid of moisture, Earth’s surface heats up, like us getting heatstroke.”
Despite all the challenges to Earth’s well-being, the planet so far has proved remarkably resilient. Of the 37 billion metric tons or so of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere each year by human activities, oceans, forests, and grasslands continue to soak up about half. No one knows yet, however, at what point such sinks might become saturated. Until recently, researchers didn’t have a good way to measure the flow of carbon in and out of them.
That changed in July 2014, when NASA launched a spacecraft called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Designed to “watch the Earth breathe,” as managers put it, OCO-2 can measure with precision—down to one molecule per million—the amount of CO? being released or absorbed by any region of the world. The first global maps using OCO-2 data showed plumes of CO? coming from northern Australia, southern Africa, and eastern Brazil, where forests were being burned for agriculture. Future maps will seek to identify regions doing the opposite—removing CO? from the atmosphere.
Greg Asner and his team also have tackled the mystery of where all the carbon goes. Prior to flying over California’s woodlands, they spent years scanning 278,000 square miles of tropical forests in Peru to calculate the forests’ carbon content.
At the time, Peru was in discussions with international partners about ways to protect its rain forests. Asner was able to show that forest areas under the most pressure from logging, farming, or oil and gas development also were holding the most carbon—roughly seven billion tons. Preserving those areas would keep that carbon locked up, Asner said, and protect countless species. In late 2014 the government of Norway pledged up to $300 million to prevent deforestation in Peru.
Within the next few years NASA plans to launch five new missions to study the water cycle, hurricanes, and climate change, including a follow-up to GRACE. Smaller Earth-observing instruments, called CubeSats—some tiny enough to fit into the palm of a hand—will hitch rides into space on other missions. For scientists like Asner, the urgency is clear. “The world is in a state of rapid change,” he said. “Things are shifting in ways we don’t yet have the science for.”
Within the next decade or so the first imaging spectrometer, similar to the ones used by Asner and Painter, could be put into Earth orbit. It would be like “Star Trek technology” compared with what’s up there now, Painter said. “We’ve orbited Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars with imaging spectrometers, but we haven’t had a committed program yet for our own planet,” he said. The view from such a device would be amazing: We’d be able to see and name individual trees from space. And we’d be reminded of the larger forest: We humans and our technology are the only hope for curing what we’ve caused.
Earth’s vital signs are monitored by NASA’s 19 Earth-observing missions. Ten of the most critical, shown here, circle the globe up to 16 times a day, collecting data on climate, weather, and natural disasters.
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WHAT THIS IS It’s a map of atmospheric carbon dioxide over land last summer, made by NASA’s OCO-2 satellite. Red areas have a bit more CO?, green areas a bit less, than the global average of 400 parts per million.
WHAT THIS TELLS US Forests and oceans have slowed global warming by soaking up some of the CO? we emit. OCO-2 will shed light on where exactly it’s going—and on how fast the planet could warm in the future.
Forests
WHAT THIS IS The Carnegie Airborne Observatory made this image of rain forest in Panama with its scanning lidar, which probes the trees’ size and shape, and a spectrometer that charts their chemical composition.
WHAT THIS TELLS US The technique allows Asner’s team, flying at 7,000 feet, to identify individual trees from their chemical signatures—and even to say how healthy they are. The reddish trees here (the colors are arbitrary) are growing the fastest and absorbing the most CO?.
Water
WHAT THIS IS It’s an image of the Tambopata River in eastern Peru made by the scanning lidar aboard the Carnegie observatory.
WHAT THIS TELLS US The area in this image is actually covered with rain forest. Some lidar pulses penetrate the forest and reflect off the ground, revealing the subtle topography—red is a few feet higher than blue—and faint, abandoned river channels that have shaped the forest and helped create its rich biodiversity.
Land
WHAT THIS IS NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these visible-light images of California and Nevada on March 27, 2010 (left), the most recent year with normal snowfall, and on March 29, 2015 (right).
WHAT THIS TELLS US After four years of drought, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada—a crucial water reservoir for California—is just 5 percent of the historical average. Snow has virtually vanished from Nevada. And west of the Sierra, in the Central Valley, much of the fertile farmland is fallow and brown.
No one gets a better look at how we’ve transformed Earth—and conquered night—than astronauts on the space station. The view here is to the north over Portugal and Spain. The green band is the aurora.
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China To Use Satellites, Drones To Monitor Pollution
August 5th, 2015
Via Eco-Business, an interesting report on a new Chinese initiative to use technology to monitor their environment:
China will build a comprehensive network to detect pollution of the land, sea and air by 2020, employing satellites, drones and remote sensors to monitor the environment.
The national leadership approved the network plan in July, saying the government will lead the monitoring, share information among departments and regions, and be held accountable if violations are found, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said on Tuesday.
Satellites, a major tool for monitoring air pollution, will receive a boost this year. The ministry said it will accelerate research on two atmospheric environmental monitoring satellites and two satellites with higher resolution than those currently available.
The ministry will improve a remote sensor network, guided by the goals of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), which is scheduled to be released at the end of this year, according to the ministry’s Environmental Supervision Department.
Remote monitoring has played a bigger role in locating pollution sources. Drones helped authorities locate polluted areas in the Tengger Desert in northern China and identify scattered summer straw burnings.
Hebei province, which has a serious air pollution problem, has cooperated with the ministry’s Satellite Environment Center to conduct monitoring from satellites and monitoring stations since January last year.
“We used the data from the center’s satellites to forecast the movement of smog during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in November,” Zhang Feng, an engineer in the Environmental Supervision Department of the provincial environmental watchdog, said on Tuesday.
Data collected from monitoring stations helped authorities provide accurate forecasts on hazy days during that period, he said.
Currently, the environmental satellites are used as support tools, as there are not enough of them, Zhang said. After the province builds a system to analyze and process data by the end of this year, the satellites will become more important.
The ministry will also strengthen the supervision of data collected through multiple channels, which is “important to keep the environmental management policies and measures effective and scientific”, Chen Jining, the environmental minister, said in July.
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Aerial Ecology: Drones Collect Environmental DNA (eDNA)
January 21st, 2015
Via MIT’s , an interesting report on the use of drones to advance ecological studies:
Drones carrying cameras or infrared sensors have already found favor with farmers, police forces, and extreme sports enthusiasts. Now engineers are testing versions of the tiny craft that can do more than just observe.
Prototypes able to swoop down to scoop up water samples are being developed to help ecologists, the oil industry, and others track oil leaks or invasive species. Some can even perform rudimentary analysis on the water they collect.
Commercial drone company PrecisionHawk, of Raleigh, North Carolina, is testing a water sampling drone with some clients in the oil industry. It takes the form of a seaplane and has a pump mounted on its pontoons that can handle even viscous swampwater thick with bugs, mud, or algae. The water is sucked into a container and then carried to a lab to check for signs of oil leaks or spills. (See a short video of the drone in action.)
“If you go up to Northern Canada or Alaska, there are literally thousands of ponds and lakes that are a few acres in size,” says PrecisionHawk CEO Ernest Earon. “Trying to walk through or take a boat to get water samples, it’s an almost impossible task.”
Earon says his team is now researching the possibility of a drone carrying a small spectrometer to analyze water for itself. That would save on energy-draining trips back to the lab.
YangQuan Chen, an engineering professor at the University of California, Merced, is testing a quadcopter drone with a buoyant frame that lands on water to collect a sample to be whisked to back to a lab for DNA extraction and sequencing.
The goal is to collect what is called environmental DNA, or eDNA, left behind by plants, animals, or other organisms. Analyzing eDNA provides a way to track diseases and endangered or invasive species. The technique is used to track populations of invasive Asian Carp around the Great Lakes, for example. Grabbing water samples by drone could make the approach more powerful by covering larger areas, says Chen. “There are some places that cannot be reached by boat or vehicle,” says Chen. “You simply cannot go there, so you have to use a drone.”
Chen says his biggest challenge has been to work out a way for the drone to land on moving water or during inclement weather. An onboard sensor registers wind gusts and software adjusts thrust in turn. The drone can scoop up water, but the researchers have not sequenced eDNA in the samples it collected.
In the long term, miniaturization of high-throughput genetic sequencing devices could allow drones to analyze their own samples, says geneticist Mike Miller of the University of California, Davis, who is collaborating with Chen. “Maybe in not that long, there’ll be drones deployed all over California, dipping down into water, sequencing all of the DNA on the fly and sending the data back to a central location,” Miller says.
Carrick Detweiler, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is working on a similar drone he calls a “Co-Aerial Ecologist.” It uses a one-meter dangling tube to suck water onboard like a straw. With water stored in onboard vials, it can then measure the samples’ temperature or conductivity (a proxy for salinity).
At a popular recreation area in Nebraska, Detweiler’s drone has already sampled from a series of small manmade lakes for toxic algae. The task routinely takes a crew of humans 12 to 14 hours, but the drone can do it in about two. The drone has also been used to search Nebraska waterways for the larvae of the invasive zebra mussel.
Detweiler predicts that there will soon be many more hands-on drones appearing. “The next generation of vehicles five to 10 years from now will be capable of getting really close to the environment, like water-sampling or collecting leaf samples,” he says. Detweiler has begun work on a drone that plucks leaves from crops with a mechanical arm, to determine the health of plants, or identify the exact variety of a weed infesting a corn field.
Chen hopes that drones like these could become cheap enough for just about anybody to use. PrecisionHawk’s seaplane drone costs $16,500 even without water sampling gear, which is scheduled to be available as an optional extra later this year. That’s cheap for oil companies but too expensive for many environmental organizations or scientists.
Chen believes that his design could lead to a water sampling drone that costs only $1,000. He envisions ecologists and even journalists being able to routinely sample bodies of water for analysis at the lab, providing a new layer of environmental oversight. “We need to make it affordable,” he says.
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Drone Conservation Mapping In Namibia
January 10th, 2015
Via Drone Adventures, a look at some of the variety of uses for drone mapping in conservation:
There is much talk on how to use drone mapping technology for nature conservation. However, projects with applicable results for both conservation land use management as well as wildlife conservation, such as animal counts, are few and far between. This past May, Drone Adventures teamed up with Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve, as well as the Polytechnic of Namibia to carry out a two-week mapping mission to explore the variety of uses that drone mapping can offer nature conservation.
Nature conservation in Namibia
The nature conservation field is known to make use of new technologies to support the hard and continuous efforts that are made worldwide by researchers, local communities, governments and hundreds of NGO’s on a daily basis to conserve the many natural wonders and animal species that try to co-habit with the ever growing human population. Namibia is on the forefront of nature conservation, and not only the government but also a large number of private landowners and local communities in conjunction with tourism companies dedicate vast efforts to conserve the semi-arid savannas and desert environments that make up 90% of the country’s surface.
Trans- and interdisciplinary research initiative
Our mission was part of a trans- and interdisciplinary research initiative led by Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve in conjunction with the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Lausanne (EPFL) and the Polytechnic of Namibia. Our part of this initiative was to acquire imagery with light-weight drones and various cameras, including multi-spectral cameras, to produce up-to-date, high-resolution maps and models for data analysis. In line with Drone Adventures’ spirit, the initiative’s goal was to share the resulting maps and models as well as the knowledge on hard- and software use with all involved parties and the local community. In view of the vast mapping mission that lay before us and the many questions our research partners wanted to answer with their in-depth analysis, two Drone Adventures teams relayed each other, each on Namibian ground for a week, to fly our drones and process the thousands of images acquired…
Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve
Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve is a local reserve managed by private landowners. Dr. Friedrich Reinhard, co-manager of the reserve as well as leader of the research initiative hosted the Drone Adventures team for 8 days on his 10’000 ha reserve with a long list of areas to map in hand. His mapping needs for Kuzikus included:
– Animal counts using drone technology
– Drone mapping for sustainable land management and land health assessment
Sharing knowledge at Polytechnic of Namibia
Namibia’s universities, such as the Polytechnic School of Namibia or UNAM (University of Namibia) prepare the engineers, researchers and tourism professionals of tomorrow to address the many challenges of nature conservation to preserve the country’s unique landscapes and wildlife all the while using these resources to support the local economy through responsible tourism and farming. At their request, after hearing about the initiative led on Kuzikus, we led a half-day workshop bringing together engineers, professors, students, researchers and government specialists. The goal of this workshop was to introduce the basics of drone mapping technology and our first experiences made on Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve the prior days. In addition to sharing our knowledge on hard- and software as well as our various mapping experiences, the excitement and interest of the workshop reached its peak during the flight demonstration that proved how easy and accessible drone mapping technology has become.
Drone mapping at Gobabeb Research & Training Center in the Namib desert
The Gobabeb Research and Training Centre is an internationally recognized center for dry land training and research, located in the Namib Desert. Gobabeb’s mission is to be a catalyst for gathering, disseminating and implementing understanding of arid environments. With many specialized research projects, Gobabeb was the perfect place to add another dimension to our Namibian mission: testing how drones and photogrammetry software can handle the difficult environment of one of the driest deserts on earth all the while producing meaningful results. We spent 2 days at Gobabeb. The first day was used for providing geo-referenced orthomosaics and 3D models for an ongoing research project on the endemic !Nara plant, distributed over long corridors in the dune valleys. A total of 3 flights over the valley, with both RGB and RE (Red Edge) cameras provided a 5km long, 500 meter wide corridor map with enough detail to easily geo-locate and assess the !Nara plants. Very much like just some days before in Windhoek, the second day was used to host a workshop for the researchers of Gobabeb, introducing the elements of drone mapping to them and sharing discussions on how this technology can help their research projects.
First answer, more questions
While this first nature conservation mission was able to test the use of drones for nature conservation purposes, the initial results lead to many more questions. During this mission, many additional possibilities of use have been determined, not only on Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve but also at the Gobabeb Research & Training Center. The possibility of using NIR and multi-spectral sensors to compliment terrestrial research for rare plant species such as the Welwitschia or !Nara plants endemic to the Namib desert, offers not only additional research possibilities but also more efficient surveying of larger areas that are difficult to access on foot or car.
Our goal is to find additional funding to return to Namibia in spring 2015. A second mission to the same areas would enable follow-up on research and provide updated maps of areas already surveyed during this first mission as well as map new areas in the Namib desert to produce high-resolution maps and indices for the Gobabeb researchers.
In the meantime, researchers at Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve, EPFL and UNAM are hard at work analyzing the 350Gb of data that we collected during our short stay. As we gather more concrete results in animal counting and identification, plant health analysis and land management we’ll be posting follow-up stories, hopefully inspiring further research and bringing drone-mapping technology into the hands of conservation leaders.
The mission in numbers:
14 days
2 teams
4 DA members on Namibian ground
4 local researchers involved
91 flights
30 % of Kuzikus making 3000 ha mapped
5 different cameras used (RGB, NIR, RE, Multi-spectral
14963 images acquired
45 hours of mapping
384 hours of processing data
Mission partners and sponsors
In addition to our local mission partners Kuzikus and Polytech of Namibia, this mission is part of the SAVMAP project. SAVMAP is co-funded by CODEV (Cooperation & Development Center of EPFL) through LASIG, the Laboratory of Geographic Information Systems of EPFL).
The Drone Adventures team used senseFly eBee mapping drones and Pix4D software for data processing and orthomosaic generation. A special thanks to our friends at Mapbox for hosting our data online.
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Drones In Conservation
December 5th, 2014
Via National Geographic, a look at the role drones can play in wildlife conservation efforts:
In the international fight against poaching, eyes in the sky could make all the difference.
But drones are expensive and hard to fly, putting them out of reach of many park managers.
For the Wildlife Conservation Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Challenge, an international competition that runs until next spring, 137 teams of students, hobbyists, and engineers from 29 countries are designing and building affordable, easy-to-use drones for the rangers of South Africa’s Kruger National Park. The goal: unmanned aircraft that can scan Kruger for poaching activity and map routes for the rangers to apprehend traffickers.
Here are five ways drones are being used on the front lines of wildlife conservation around the world. (View photos of elephants and anti-poaching efforts.)
1. Fighting Wildlife Crime
Drones already act as wildlife police, scoping out poachers in Kenya and Nepal. With a $5 million grant from Google, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has launched aerial surveillance in remote areas in Africa and Asia, where endangered species like elephants and rhinoceroses are most vulnerable to illegal trafficking.
Beyond poaching, unmanned aircraft are tackling illegal fishing, hunting, and burning. In Belize, drones are saving threatened fish populations by finding vessels that are over their catch limits, fishing without permits, or in restricted waters.
2. Getting Up Close
By getting nearer to animals than people often can, drones take intimate photographs and collect solid data. Piloted by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Vancouver Aquarium, a hexacopter drone (a remote-controlled aircraft with six rotors) recently hovered 100 feet (30 meters) above a group of killer whales off British Columbia, Canada. With images from the drone, scientists were able get a better picture of which whales were malnourished, which were pregnant, and which were likely to die.
3. Counting Populations
Getting an accurate population size not only tells park managers how much food and habitat is needed for a certain species, but also how threatened that species might be. (Read about other drone uses ranging from border patrol to crop dusting.)
In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service are using a retired Raven A—an aircraft once deployed in warfare that’s been replaced by sleeker combat drones—to tally sandhill cranes, a popular game bird.
“It’s a safer alternative to the fixed-wing aircrafts we’ve been using since the 1950s,” said Leanne Hanson, the USGS biologist flying the drone. “When they’re roosting at night, the cranes are not disturbed when the Raven flies over. They don’t flush off and collide mid-air.”
4. Getting the Big Picture
To understand how climate change and industrial development affect wildlife, ecologists need a birds-eye view. National Geographic grantee Jeffrey Kerby uses drones to map caribou habitat in west Greenland, tracking changes in plant cover and sea ice over time.
Designed specifically for conservation, inexpensive, ecologist-made drones have flown over northern Sumatra, Indonesia, where demand for palm oil has destroyed palm tree habitat for orangutans. The drones detected where the furry orange animals nest and where logging and forest fires were happening. (View photos of drones taking on hurricanes and fires.)
“[Surveying habitats] is a very time-consuming and labor-intensive task, requiring researchers to spend days hiking through the forest looking for these nests,” said Lian Pin Koh, an ecologist who worked in Sumatra and a pioneer in drone conservation. “A forest that would normally require one to two weeks to survey can be done in a few days using a drone.”
5. Doing Chores
Drones also assist in the unsexy tasks of conservation, including weeding and fence mending. In 2012, a Raven aircraft scanned Hawaii’s Haleakala National Park for tears in the park’s fence and for miconia, an invasive weed threatening native Hawaiian flora.
The mission wasn’t as successful as hoped—high winds made for blurry pictures. But the drone saved the rangers the trouble of navigating the park’s extreme temperatures and rugged terrain, said Matt Brown, Haleakala’s chief resource manager. The pictures were clear enough that rangers were able to identify places worth visiting to check on ripped fences and troublesome weeds.
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Tibetan Plateau Gets Wired Up For Monsoon Prediction
October 1st, 2014
Via Nature, an interesting report on use of technology to monitor the Tibetan Plateau:
The Tibetan plateau, often called the third pole, will be monitored by balloons, drones, and ground sensors.
The gigantic, remote Tibetan plateau is being flooded with sensors in an unprecedented attempt to understand its influence on climate — especially the Asian monsoons, which caused deadly flooding in India and Pakistan in September. The US$49-million Chinese effort could help to predict extreme weather — both in Asia and as far afield as North America — and give scientists a steer on how climate change affects these events.
Sitting at an average height of around 4,000 metres above sea level, the plateau protrudes into the middle of the troposphere, where most weather events originate. As the biggest and highest plateau in the world, it disturbs this part of the atmosphere like no other structure on Earth. But there are little data on the impact that this has on climate.
In central and western Tibet, where weather observations are particularly lacking, researchers jointly funded by the China Meteorological Administration and the National Natural Science Foundation of China began, in August, to place temperature and moisture detectors in the soil and to erect 32-metre-high towers laden with sensors that measure cloud properties. In recent weeks, the team has begun deploying sensors mounted on weather balloons and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Such sensors will eventually monitor a vast swathe of the plateau’s ground and air — across diverse landscapes such as desert, grassland, forest and farmland. “The data should help determine the extent to which different types of land surface heat up the overlying air, and how this might vary in response to factors such as snow cover and vegetation changes,” says Wu Guoxiong, an atmospheric scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing and a principal investigator of the project.
Scientists agree that Tibet plays a key part in the climate system, but many of the details are a mystery. The plateau’s remoteness, altitude and harsh conditions — it is often called the third pole because it hosts the world’s third-largest stock of ice — mean that even basic weather stations are few. Satellite data are also plagued by large errors owing to lack of calibration from ground observations.
“Climate models have the greatest uncertainties in Tibet and the Himalayas, and are especially weak at simulating monsoons,” says Xu Xiangde, an atmospheric scientist at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences in Beijing and investigator on the project. This dearth of information about the plateau, acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, affects scientists’ ability to predict how the climate is changing, and the consequences for people living in vulnerable regions.
The plateau’s altitude means that it receives more sunlight and so gets hotter than land at sea level. And because land absorbs more solar radiation than air, the plateau acts like a giant heating plate. This heat pumps air upwards, which disperses in the upper troposphere, giving the plateau an outsized influence over atmospheric circulation, and thus climate. The heating effect also intensifies monsoons, which arise as a result of a temperature difference between land and the oceans that sets up a pressure gradient in the atmosphere. In 2008, Wu reported that the surface heating of the plateau had been weakening since the 1980s (A. Duan & G. Wu J. Clim. 21, 3149–3164; 2008), consistent with a weakening in the strength of Asian monsoons. But monsoons seem to be getting stronger again, and occurring in places where they were previously rare, says Klaus Fraedrich, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
In early September, a deadly flood caused by a monsoon hit border regions between India and Pakistan that are normally dry, killing hundreds and affecting millions more. If the Chinese project can help to explain why monsoons are changing, it “could help instigate early evacuation plans and save many lives”, says Fraedrich.
The project could have yet broader effects. A team led by Hai Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Environment Canada in Quebec, found that the greater the snow cover in Tibet, the warmer the winter in Canada (H. Lin & Z. Wu J. Clim. 24, 2801–2813; 2011). The latest initiative could confirm Lin’s suspicion that increased snow cover causes the plateau to reflect more sunlight, reducing its heating capability and strengthening a pressure system that causes warmer-than-usual winters in North America. Ma Yaoming, an atmospheric scientist at the CAS Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing, says that combined with data on glaciers, permafrost, rivers and lakes, the project will contribute to a better picture of Asia’s entire water cycle.
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