Exactly one year after our first mission to Namibia for the SAVMAP project, a team made up of Drones For Earth, EPFL’s LASIG lab and Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve came together again in the Southern African savanna from May 16 to 23, 2015 to apply last year’s findings and push the limits of civilian drone use for nature conservation applications one step further.

Protecting endangered animals like the Black Rhino and plants like the endemic and fascinating Welwitschia mirabilis, proposing new ways of managing land sustainably in semi-arid savannas and finding new approaches to counting wildlife were all important topics on our agenda this year.

The mission in numbers:

• Project performed in: 2015
• Total flights: 55
• Flying days: 8 days
• Total flight time: 26hrs
• UAS platform: 3 senseFly eBees
• Camera payloads: RGB, NIR, multispectral, thermal
• Images acquired: 39,782

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Timothée Produit of EPFL’s LASIG lab was part of our Namibian mission in May 2014. During the mission, Tim gave lectures both at the Polytechnic of Namibia as well as at the Gobabeb Research & Training Center on how to use the acquired drone imagery to classify terrain. Once all the imagery of the mission had been processed back home in Switzerland, Tim went on to use our data for classification purposes.

In this blog, we explore how to use multi-spectral imagery acquired by the eBee, processed into orthomosaics using Pix4Dmapper, to create vegetation base maps.

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Most Drones For Earth missions to date have involved using eBee mapping drones to assist humanitarian projects. However in recent months we have taken part in an increasing number of environmental conservation projects too, such as our recent Namibia mission.

Here in Switzerland we were contacted by Pro Natura, a non-profit conservation organization with over 100,000 members, to help with a unique biodiversity project – using drones to create orthomosaics and terrain models of an ancient peat bog in need of regeneration.

Following the redevelopment work of site one, the presence of so much surface water and tufts of new dark green vegetation now indicate a healthy site.

The mission in numbers:

• Project performed in: 2014
• Sites mapped: 2 (1 for immediate redevelopment, 1 for future redevelopment)
• Days: 0.5
• Drones For Earth staff: 3
• Pro Natura staff: 1
• Total flights: 4 (2 covering site 1, with 2 further flights over site 2)
• Flight coverage:
  • Flights 1 & 2 (site 1): 0.23km2
  • Flights 3 & 4 (site 2): 0.35 km2
• Camera payload: RGB
• Total images acquired: 1,061
• Orthomosaic accuracy: 3.4 cm (1.3 in) per pixel
• Digital surface model accuracy: 4.4 cm (1.7 in) per pixel

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In May 2014, four members of Drones For Earth spent two weeks in the wild Namibian bush drone-mapping savanna, sand and rock for land and wildlife conservation.

As a picture speaks a thousand words, here’s a gallery of images from our flights at Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve and the Gobabeb Research and Training Center.

The mission in numbers:

• Project performed in: 2014
• UAS platform: senseFly eBee
• Camera payload: RGB
• Total flights: 91
• Total images acquired: 15,000

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