Congrats to Alejandro Navarro on the new Paper in the Remote Sensing of Environment!

Our group member Alejandro Navarro just published part of his research in Remote Sensing of Environment. The paper is entitled: " The application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to estimate above-ground biomass of mangrove ecosystems".

Navarro et al., 2020

Mangrove ecosystems are targeted for many conservation and rehabilitation efforts due to their ability to store large amounts of carbon in their living biomass and soil. Traditional methods to monitor above-ground biomass (AGB) rely on on-ground measurements, which are expensive, labour intensive and cover small spatial scales.

Structure from Motion and Multi-View Stereo reconstructions from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles imagery (UAV-SfM) have the potential to increase fieldwork efficiency by providing a greater amount of spatial information in less time. However, there is still a need to assess the ability of UAV-SfM to retrieve structural information of mangrove forests, which could pose challenges in areas of high forest complexity and density.

In this study they successfully used UAV-SfM data to estimate height, canopy diameter and AGB of natural and rehabilitated mangrove forests across two regions of the southeastern coast of Australia. he methods described in this study open the possibility for easily repeatable, low-cost UAV-SfM surveys for local managers by providing a faster, more cost-effective approach for monitoring mangrove forests over larger areas than traditional on-ground surveys while maintaining forest inventory data accuracy in both natural and rehabilitated mangrove forests.

This study is part of the Mapping Ocean Wealth project from The Nature Conservancy's Great Southern Seascapes program and supported by The Thomas Foundation, HSBC Australia, the Ian Potter Foundation, and Victorian and New South Wales governments including Parks Victoria, Department of Environment Land Water and Planning, Victorian Fisheries Authority, New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, and New South Wales Department of Primary Industries.

The authors of the paper also include the group members Mary Young, Blake Allan, Paul Carnell and Daniel Ierodiaconou. Congrats to all!

To read the full article, click here.