Tree cover analyses in Tanzania in collaboration with EnviroDrone

Last May the Conservation Drones team revisited the Issa region in  western Tanzania to continue the collaboration with the Ugalla Primate Project, Jane Goodall Institute Tanzania. For some of the land-cover analyses we teamed up with  and EnviroDrone. The Conservation Drones field team consisted of co-founder Serge Wich, technical director Jeff Kerby, and Noemie Bonnin (PhD student at LJMU). After the course a few dozen missions flow with quad-copters and fixed-wing mapping units, some of the the data were sent to EnviroDrone for land-cover classification analysis. Knowing tree density and canopy structure are key elements to understanding how wild primates, and especially chimpanzees, exploit a mosaic landscape in the Issa valley, western Tanzania. The work by EnviroDrone to extrapolate these data from UAV imagery collected over the study area has the potential to inform the sympatric animal niche construction, and further, reveal to researchers a metric of diversity in the landscape – canopy structure – that we do not have access to from the ground. The ENVD team consisted of Founder/CEO Ryan Cant, CSA Richard Zeng, and Rebecca Shearon (University of Windsor).