Studying the Sequoia Eco-System with Drones

The drone manufacturing Parrot, recently partnered with Dr. Todd Dawson, the University of California located faculty for promotion of innovation and further usage of drone technology which means it can further be used for monitoring and measurement of forest ecosystems. Currently, California is facing one of the biggest record-establishing drought that has killed more than 60 million trees in last some years. It is one of the biggest worries of scientists on how these uncountable deaths are going to affect the Sierra Nevada Mountains that stand for the iconic large sequoia trees.

The project is taking, an altogether different approach towards study of water flow through giant sequoia trees. Their main objective is to develop a better understanding of the procedure that is used by individual sequoias for surviving through centuries and how they will continue to survive in coming times under climate change. Dr. Gregory Crutsinger, the lead of this Scientific Program for Parrot, says, “This is a fascinating collaboration for us, we are combining skill sets of scientific research and professional tree climbing to map the interior structure of a tree crown with cutting-edge drone technology to scan the outside. Together, we have an amazing 3-dimensional dataset that is unique to the world!”

It is dangerous to climb these trees with harnesses and ropes. Therefore, the team plans to use drones for collection of canopy data in a quick and safe manner with drone imagery. Manually, it will take people weeks and days to collect so much data. Dr. Dawson says, “Tackling a huge and critically important issue like climate change requires research that leads to solutions. Drones with their new on-board sensor packages are powerful new tools that will allow us to look very closely at single trees but then really pull back and look at how an entire forest is responding too, in both time and over space.”