Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environmental biology: a review

Abstract

Acquiring information about the environment is a key step during each study in the field of environmental biology at different levels, from an individual species to community and biome. However, obtaining information about the environment is frequently difficult because of, for example, the phenological timing, spatial distribution of a species or limited accessibility of a particular area for the field survey. Moreover, remote sensing technology, which enables the observation of the Earth’s surface and is currently very common in environmental research, has many limitations such as insufficient spatial, spectral and temporal resolution and a high cost of data acquisition. Since the 1990s, researchers have been exploring the potential of different types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring Earth’s surface. The present study reviews recent scientific literature dealing with the use of UAV in environmental biology. Amongst numerous papers, short communications and conference abstracts, we selected 110 original studies of how UAVs can be used in environmental biology and which organisms can be studied in this manner. Most of these studies concerned the use of UAV to measure the vegetation parameters such as crown height, volume, number of individuals (14 studies) and quantification of the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation changes (12 studies). UAVs were also frequently applied to count birds and mammals, especially those living in the water. Generally, the analytical part of the present study was divided into following sections: (1) detecting, assessing and predicting threats on vegetation, (2) measuring the biophysical parameters of vegetation, (3) quantifying the dynamics of changes in plants and habitats and (4) population and behaviour studies of animals. At the end, we also synthesised all the information showing, amongst others, the advances in environmental biology because of UAV application. Considering that 33% of studies found and included in this review were published in 2017 and 2018, it is expected that the number and variety of applications of UAVs in environmental biology will increase in the future.

Monitoring of Plant Species and Communities on Coastal Cliffs: Is the Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Suitable?

“…In the last 20 years Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, have been successfully applied to monitor plant communities for ecological research and for conservation and applicative purposes, but their use regards only horizontal plant communities [29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. On the other hand, for many years, UAVs and digital photogrammetry software have been successfully applied to assess and monitor geological risk in steep slope rocky cliffs [36][37][38][39][40].…”

Contribution of SPOT-7 multi-temporal imagery for mapping wetland vegetation

“…More recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used to collect centimetric resolution images, which is highly effective for mapping local plant communities (Kattenborn et al, 2019). However, the advantages of UAV data are tempered by the acquisition and pre-processing effort required (Yao et al, 2019), as well as by the uncertain quality of the images collected (Nowak et al, 2019).…”

Measuring High Levels of Total Suspended Solids and Turbidity Using Small Unoccupied Aerial Systems (sUAS) Multispectral Imagery

“…As a fairly new tool, sUAS have become popular remote sensing platforms due to their high-resolution data, low cost, and maneuverability [21][22][23]. However, there have been few sUAS studies on water quality monitoring.…”