RESEARCHERS with the Future Farm Industries Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) have embraced innovation by employing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to take images of mallee trees.
Researcher Richard Bennett (CSIRO) said the UAV was a cost-effective way to get above the trees and collect images which provide data on growth rates.
“It’s relatively easy to fly the UAV or drone above the trees and take photos and video. We use the images to determine the area of leaves on the trees, and from that we can calculate their biomass and, over time, their growth rates,” Mr Bennett said.
The research is part of the CRC’s new woody crop industries program, which focuses on the use of mallee trees to produce biomass for biofuel and bioenergy.
Mr Bennett said measuring the trees had previously been time consuming and labour intensive.
“We need to know how big the trees are and how fast they are growing so that we can measure the effects of treatments like extra water and nutrients. The UAV has given us a simple way of collecting these measurements. The one we are using is a quadcopter – it’s like a model helicopter except it has four overhead propellers, which make it very stable in the air. It’s stable enough to use as a platform to take high resolution photos with very high definition, so we can see individual leaves in the images.
“Future development of the UAV should also allow us to perceive the height of the trees from the UAV images,” Mr Bennet said.
“This is new technology and we have only scratched the surface of what we could do with it. The UAVs were originally developed for the US military but they open a range of remote measurement and monitoring opportunities for our research.”
The UAV is being used at the CRC’s mallee trial site on a private farm near Narrogin, south-east of Perth, Western Australia.
