Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environmental biology: A Review

Acquiring information about the environment is a key step during each study in the field of environmental biology at different levels, from an individual species to community and biome. However, obtaining information about the environment is frequently difficult because of, for example, the phenological timing, spatial distribution of a species or limited accessibility of a particular area for the field survey. Moreover, remote sensing technology, which enables the observation of the Earth’s surface and is currently very common in environmental research, has many limitations such as insufficient spatial, spectral and temporal resolution and a high cost of data acquisition. Since the 1990s, researchers have been exploring the potential of different types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring Earth’s surface. The present study reviews recent scientific literature dealing with the use of UAV in environmental biology. Amongst numerous papers, short communications and conference abstracts, we selected 110 original studies of how UAVs can be used in environmental biology and which organisms can be studied in this manner. Most of these studies concerned the use of UAV to measure the vegetation parameters such as crown height, volume, number of individuals (14 studies) and quantification of the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation changes (12 studies). UAVs were also frequently applied to count birds and mammals, especially those living in the water. Generally, the analytical part of the present study was divided into following sections: (1) detecting, assessing and predicting threats on vegetation, (2) measuring the biophysical parameters of vegetation, (3) quantifying the dynamics of changes in plants and habitats and (4) population and behaviour studies of animals. At the end, we also synthesised all the information showing, amongst others, the advances in environmental biology because of UAV application. Considering that 33% of studies found and included in this review were published in 2017 and 2018, it is expected that the number and variety of applications of UAVs in environmental biology will increase in the future

INSPIRE Newsletter Fall 2022

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/inspire-newsletters/1011/thumbnail.jp

Optimizing olive disease classification through transfer learning with unmanned aerial vehicle imagery

Early detection of diseases in growing olive trees is essential for reducing costs and increasing productivity in this crucial economic activity. The quality and quantity of olive oil depend on the health of the fruit, making accurate and timely information on olive tree diseases critical to monitor growth and anticipate fruit output. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning (DL) has made it possible to quickly monitor olive diseases over a large area indeed of limited sampling methods. Moreover, the limited number of research studies on olive disease detection has motivated us to enrich the literature with this work by introducing new disease classes and classification methods for this tree. In this study, we present a UAV system using convolutional neuronal network (CNN) and transfer learning (TL). We constructed an olive disease dataset of 14K images, processed and trained it with various CNN in addition to the proposed MobileNet-TL for improved classification and generalization. The simulation results confirm that this model allows for efficient diseases classification, with a precision accuracy achieving 99% in validation. In summary, TL has a positive impact on MobileNet architecture by improving its performance and reducing the training time for new tasks