Missions – Page 2 – Drones For Earth

Classifying Namibia’s savanna: Turning drone imagery into vegetation base maps

Written on January 15, 2015.

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.

Preserving peat bogs in Switzerland

Written on December 20, 2014.

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

Aircheology in Turkey

Written on August 12, 2014.

It isn’t every day that we get to fly drones over one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Thanks to our intrepid partners and hosts, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (NYU) and the Austrian Archaeological Institute, we’ve just returned from an amazing week in Southern Turkey where we flew over ancient theatres and temples dating as far back as the 10th Century BC.

*Setting up Ground Control Points (GCPs) to improve the precision of the imagery. In the background, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, Turkey.*

Nature conservation in Namibia

Written on August 4, 2014.

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

Fukushima – a drones eye view

Written on April 16, 2014.

It’s been three years since a massive magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami destroyed large parts of the eastern coast of Japan and incapacitated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Life for many of the displaced families, however, has far from returned to normal; around 150,000 residents of the prefecture are still living as evacuees in temporary accommodations, and many villages are still too contaminated for people to return.

What is the current state of the cleanup and reconstruction effort? Drones For Earth teamed up with Taichi Furuhashi, researcher at the Center for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tokyo, to try to answer this question. Over the course of several days, we mapped three unique towns in Fukushima district: Iidate village, Hisanohama, and Tomioka.

Mapping the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan

Written on March 1, 2014.

When Typhoon Haiyan, known as Yolanda in the Philippines, struck the South East coast of the country six months ago, on November 8, 2013, it devastated entire communities – tearing apart thousands of homes and destroying livelihoods. Many of those worst hit were ‘informal’ unplanned homes, situated at or near the water’s edge.

One of the humanitarian organisations that stepped up to help was Swiss-based Medair, which is dedicated to relieving human suffering in some of the world’s most remote and badly affected places. However after arriving in the country just 48 hours after Yolanda struck and conducting their initial assessments, the Medair team soon discovered that accurate, up-to-date maps of the region didn’t exist, with communities often having to rely on either hand-drawn maps or outdated Google versions.

This data gap is why Medair asked Drones For Earth to get involved.

Create detailed 2D base maps and 3D terrain models of Tacloban, Dulag and Julita municipalities
Assess typhoon damage and plan shelter reconstruction

Classifying Namibia’s savanna: Turning drone imagery into vegetation base maps

Preserving peat bogs in Switzerland

The mission in numbers:

Aircheology in Turkey

Nature conservation in Namibia

The mission in numbers:

Fukushima – a drones eye view

Mapping the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan

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