It’s finally approaching what conservation scientists need to have: seeing the wood and the trees.
- David Coomes
Soaring over the tree canopy of one of the most biodiverse forests on earth, a tiny unmanned plane buzzes quietly through the air. Its pilot stands 250 m below, controlling its flight remotely. This unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is gathering data essential to understanding and diagnosing the health of the rainforest below.
The plane is one of a small fleet currently undergoing test flights in Indonesia. Each has been equipped with remote sensors. Their task is to image both the Harapan Rainforest – a 100,000 hectare area of formerly logged forest that is now managed for conservation by a group of NGOs including the RSPB – and a highly threatened forested area on the coast of Kenya.
Globally, around one billion hectares of degraded tropical forest like Harapan might be restorable, enabling them to continue to contribute to the planet’s biodiversity and its carbon and water cycles. But a major problem faced by conservation managers is how to survey extensive areas in which conditions can vary in just a few hundred square metres and are continually changing through natural regeneration.
A group of conservation scientists at the University of Cambridge Department of Plant Sciences, RSPB and A Rocha International (which works in Kenya) has embarked on what it hopes is a cost-effective and high-quality solution, funded by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Collaborative Fund. Lead researcher Dr David Coomes, explained: “Forest conservation activities often rely on airborne monitoring and satellite imagery to provide information but these are either expensive or don’t offer a fine-enough resolution. We’ve decided to use inexpensive sensors on UAVs to spot areas of the trashed forest that are showing early signs of recovery.”
The researchers need to measure the health of the forest on a tree-by-tree basis – locating, identifying and counting key species indicative of recovery. Multiply this up by hundreds of thousands of hectares, repeated at time intervals in the future, and it becomes a huge imaging, computational and ‘big data’ challenge.
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Image: Airborne mapping of the tree canopy in a tropical West African forest
Credit: Gaia Vaglio Laurin, published in PLOS One DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0097910
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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