Drones
can map large areas of habitat for the ecology sector, which can save a
substantial amount of time and money for clients.
Using Drones to help survey large areas quickly and provide a
bird’s eye view of the landscape below is shaking up the industry and improving
the way in which some of the traditional and time-consuming work is now done.
A specialist team at ecology consultancy, Thomson Ecology,
has been doing exciting work in the ecology sector as they use Drones to look
at how they can benefit business efficiency and create more useful in-depth
information for clients. They are appropriately qualified and certified to use Drones
commercially and work alongside ecologists on site helping to map large areas
of terrain and topography for ecology purposes.
The team recently worked with Essex & Suffolk Water using Drones
on an exciting and innovative project which mapped 269 hectares of land across
Norfolk, including Trinity Broad, from above and gave Essex & Suffolk Water
data which they could share with their whole team and use for future
comparisons of habitat changes.
The team at Thomson Ecology has combined this drone technology
with their own bespoke interactive mapping system, TIM (Thomson
Interactive Mapping), which allows the high-resolution drone imagery to be
overlaid with habitat mapping, allowing clients to track habitat changes over a
period of time.
drone-based surveys, such as those carried out for Essex &
Suffolk Water, involve a lot of planning with steps that need to be followed to
ensure the safe and successful acquisition of data, whether it is still
imagery, film or other information. A flight plan must be put together
and checks done on the area to be surveyed to check it is not in restricted
airspace. All relevant permissions must be sought in advance and weather
forecasts checked to ensure flying conditions are suitable. Once those
preparatory steps have been taken, work can start. The work at Trinity Broad
for Essex & Suffolk Water took place in mid-winter so the team had to watch
carefully for a suitable weather window before they could fly. After a
final review of the site to check for any flying constraints missed during
remote mapping of the area, the flight plan was finalised, the flight team
briefed and the survey was able to start.
This particular flight mainly consisted of identifying the areas
to be flown and establishing an appropriate flight height, speed and pattern.
Autonomous systems within the drone dealt with a lot of the flight handling and
control, while the pilot and other members of the flight team monitored the
progress of the flight and kept a close watch for any potential incursions into
the flight area both on the ground and in the air.
The Trinity Broads survey area was large so the team repeated
their flight plan many times over the course of a week. An extra
complication arose from the occasional need to launch and land the drone from a
boat when surveying large areas of water. With the surveys completed and the
captured imagery safely stored on the company servers, just over four and a
half thousand individual aerial images were merged into a single,
geo-referenced image suitable for mapping and habitat identification.
With the aerial imagery processed and merged into the large-scale images, the final step was to produce habitat maps. For this particular survey, the habitat mapping was primarily focused on a section of the Broad rather than the whole site. To a large extent, the habitat mapping was undertaken using manual identification and digitisation directly from the aerial imagery, though where possible and appropriate, image recognition software and automated processes were employed to speed things up.
Get some quotes for a drone operator
âś” 100% free serviceâś” Featured in the SMH, The Age & WA Today
âś” 1,800+ online recommendations
