UAV Flight Experiments Applied to the Remote Sensing of Vegetated Areas

Abstract

The miniaturization of electronics, computers and sensors has created new opportunities for remote sensing applications. Despite the current restrictions on regulation, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with small thermal, laser or spectral sensors has emerged as a promising alternative for assisting modeling, mapping and monitoring applications in rangelands, forests and agricultural environments. This review provides an overview of recent research that has reported UAV flight experiments on the remote sensing of vegetated areas. To provide a differential trend to other reviews, this paper is not limited to crops and precision agriculture applications, but also includes forest and rangeland applications. This work follows a top-down categorization strategy and attempts to fill the gap between application requirements and the characteristics of selected tools, payloads and platforms. Furthermore, correlations between common requirements and the most frequently used solutions are highlighted.

The burying and grazing effects of plateau pika on alpine grassland are small: a pilot study in a semiarid basin on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

“…Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have developed rapidly due to miniaturization and low cost of various sensors and embedded computers (Salami et al, 2014). UAVs have recently become a popular platform at a low cost for high-precision photography and other applications.…”

Inventory of Small Forest Areas Using an Unmanned Aerial System

“…In recent years, the civilian market for UASs has increased rapidly and has become a highly dynamic and diverse market to meet the objectives of a variety of applications. UAVs are generally defined as aircraft with no pilot on board, and the main interest for environmental applications lies in rotor and fixed-wing aircraft equipped with laser, spectral, or thermal sensors to produce three-dimensional (3D) or spectral data [8].…”

Cicada (<i>Magicicada</i>) Tree Damage Detection Based on UAV Spectral and 3D Data

“…The main advantages of the UAV are the low cost of acquisition [19,20], possibility of frequent monitoring [21,22], adaptability to carry various sensors, as thermal, infrared and multispectral cameras or even Lidar scanners [19,[23][24][25], the high resolution obtained [19,23,26], and the development of processing software focused on the automatic reconstruction of surfaces using the UAV data [27,28]. An example of surface reconstruction has been in forest structure [29].…”