Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)

The ABR UAS program is leading the expansion of UAS applications for vegetation, wildlife, and other remote sensing surveys. These can be focused UAS surveys or as a supplement to planned field surveys. Our team has developed novel, replicable methods for relating multispectral UAS imagery to percent cover of vegetation and bare ground in natural and reclamation settings, with ground-truth data validation. Using techniques developed in-house, we classify multispectral UAS mosaics and estimate the areal extent of the different land cover classes at rehabilitation sites. To date, much of our UAS work has been done in collaboration with both resource development and regulator shareholders in an effort to prove the effectiveness of UAS-based remote sensing in various survey and rehabilitation scenarios.