Drone Tools Workshop: Vegetation Mapping for Professionals

UAVs, or drones, are an emerging technology for high-resolution aerial mapping and provide a powerful new tool for agriculture, forestry, and environmental monitoring throughout the growing season. However, accurate vegetation mapping can require more advanced skills, such as the use of multispectral cameras, the need to cover larger areas with fixed wings, and image processing to visualize plant patterns.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a weekend of hands-on training for vegetation mapping with UAVs, sensors, and software. The target audience is broadly applicable to professionals needing to learn the tools necessary to produce quality imagery layers. This includes forestry, wildfire risk assessment, agricultural applications, environmental consultancies, academic research, drone service providers, and more.

Topics covered will include:

• Drone hardware and sensors (including fixed wings)
• Mission planning
• Best practices for data capture
• Data processing on the desktop (Pix4D) and cloud
• Additional complimentary data tools for vegetation visualization using drones
• Hands-on mapping field exercises

2 nights of housing and meals are included in this workshop at the Blue Oak Ranch (University of California Research Station), an ecological reserve and biological field station in Santa Clara County, California. It is located on 3,260 acres in the Diablo Range, northwest of Mount Hamilton.

No drone experience required prior to the workshop.

Further details and questions can be directed to Greg Crutsinger ([email protected]).