Oil Palm Landscape Mapped by Drone
Keeyen (our Asia team member) used his Skywalker 1900 equipped with an APM 2 and Canon S100 to map an oil palm estate owned by a friend. Keeyen’s Skywalker was able to track the waypoints extremely well even in strong crosswind conditions.
The entire landscape was mapped in just a single mission, in which the drone flew for about 30 minutes for a distance of 16 km, covering about 200 ha of the landscape from 300 m above ground. The Canon camera was programmed to snap a picture every three seconds.
This mosaic was stitched together from a subset of 172 images using AutoPanoGiga. The result is quite promising.
An excellent example of what a 30 min drone transect can achieve – perfect too for presentations highlighting their use in conservation, as this picture really does show in detail just where the boundaries between the oil palm, river and existing forest lie.
Al, The Mongolian team and I are waiting to deploy them in the Mongolian Steppes to help us with our biodiversity assessments! Cant wait to hear how your trials in Whipsnade goes in spring/summer!
Hooray! Smart and cost effective.
Hello, sorry to say this, but the quality of the images is rather bad. The individual photos a blurred and not sharp. How come? In particular using the Canon S100 this could be avoided! Also, whith such an image quality (automated) analysis becomes more difficult.
I would also like to ask, in which context this work took place. In which way is this palm oil plantation related to a ‘conservation’ project?
Cheers
Lovely blog you haave