Review of Effective Vegetation Mapping Using the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Method

A vegetation map illustrates the geographical spread of a plant community, which is a vegetation unit and can provide extremely important basic information for environmental planning. Improvements in efficiency and precision have enabled vegetation to be mapped using aerial photographs and satellite data.

UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) methods can be used in various fields and have increased the efficiency of information gathering during disasters, for remote sensing in the forest and agricultural sectors, in the management and monitoring of rivers and embankments, and in the measurement and surveying of structures and topography. Moreover, UAV system was effective in identifying the present vegetation, and is possible to generate detailed map of vegetation assemblages at the species level.

In this study, the authors tried more precise mapping of vegetation using UAV and aimed to be clearly the efficient mapping of vegetation using the UAV method by comparing vegetation maps created by analyzing aerial photographs taken by a UAV and an aircraft (manned flight). The aerial photography using UAV was conducted in the Niida River estuary (the secondary river flowing into Minamisoma City in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan). The photography period was in August 2013. We analyzed the aerial photographs using ArcGis 9 (Esri Japan Corporation, Tokyo, Japan).

The aerial photographs of the main plant communities (Phragmites australis, Typha domingensis, and Miscanthus sacchariflorus) taken by the UAV could clearly discriminate each plant community at the 1/50 scale. Moreover, it could clearly discriminate the shape of a plant at the 1/10 scale. We compared the vegetation maps by analysing the aerial photos taken by a UAV (2013 shooting) and an aircraft (2011 shooting). As a result, the vegetation map created by the UAV method could clearly discriminate community distributions.

In summary, the findings show that vegetation surveys using UAV are possible and are capable of a highly precise community division in places where field reconnaissance is difficult. And the UAV method is effective and will contribute to the improvement of research methods in the future; this method may reduce research costs associated with a reduction in field survey days and man-power.

Article by Korehisa Kaneko and Seiich Nohara, from Japan.

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