When an endangered plant’s favorite place to live is the side of a mountain, keeping track of its numbers typically requires rappelling down cliff faces with specialized gear––no mean feat. Now, a drone-based approach developed by researchers from North Carolina State University is making rare plant monitoring on mountaintops safer and more efficient.
Working with collaborators from NC State’s Center for Geospatial Analytics, the US Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, doctoral researcher Will Reckling devised a method to both predict where rare mountain plants are likely to grow and then target high-probability areas for flying unmanned aerial systems (UAS, a.k.a. drones) and snapping photos with an onboard camera.
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