Detecting Floral Resource Availability Using Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Abstract

Floral resources for native pollinators that live in wildland settings are diverse and vary across and within growing seasons. Understanding floral resource dynamics and management is becoming increasingly important as honeybee farms seek public land for summer pasture. Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUASs) present a viable approach for accurate broad floristic surveys and present an additional solution to more traditional alternative methods of vegetation assessment. This methodology was designed as a simplified approach using tools frequently available to land managers. The images of three subalpine meadows were captured from a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone platform three times over the growing season in 2019 in Sanpete County, Utah. The images were composited using Pix4D software 4.5.6and classified using a simple supervised approach in ENVI 4.8 and ArcGIS Pro 2.4.3 These same meadows were assessed using two traditional ocular methods of vegetation cover–meter-squared quadrats and macroplot estimation. The areas assessed with these methods were compared side by side with their classified counterparts from drone imagery. Classified images were not only found to be highly accurate when detecting overall floral cover and floral color groups (76–100%), but they were also strongly correlated with quadrat estimations, suggesting that these methods used in tandem may be a conducive strategy toward increased accuracy and efficiency when determining floral cover at broad spatial scales.

Seminatural Grasslands: An Emblematic Challenge for Nature Conservation in Protected Areas

“…The next step would be a spatialization of the information by way of vegetation maps at a scale fine enough (1:10,000) to depict grassland-type variability; however, this would be not only a static view but also an arduous task to accomplish in huge areas, as also pointed out by Primi et al (2016) [157]. In this frame, the here-developed Google Earth Engine (GEE) application shows particular usefulness in providing near-real-time data to address conservative grassland management and demonstrates the general trend towards highly technological agriculture and robotic environmental monitoring [166][167][168][169][170][171][172][173][174][175][176]. Satellite remote sensing is invaluable in this context, offering a cost-efficient, timely, and replicable method for vegetation analysis [31,177].…”