ABSTRACT
Emerging technologies in Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) remote sensing present opportunities to address the challenges in Everglades’s vegetation mapping. UAS has several advantages over satellite and manned airborne remote sensing platforms including a relatively low cost of data acquisition, ability for rapid deployment, and high resolution of output imagery. This chapter examines the development of UAS as a remote sensing platform and the utilization of UAS-based remote sensing data products for detailed, species-level vegetation mapping in a restored wetland in the Greater Everglades. The availability of different payloads or sensors for UAS has increased in due to a trend in miniaturization of the systems. Advances in the field of computer vision have produced an alternative technique for generating 3-Dimension data using UAS imagery collected at a high rate of overlap. The UAS images were first converted from 16-bit RAW files to 16-bit TIFFs using Mapir Camera Control software.
