Abstract
During the last decade, the use of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for civil applications has considerably grown in different disciplines such as agriculture, forestry, construction/civil engineering, reconnaissance services and cultural heritage management. This is because the continuous development in the field of electronics has brought compact and robust control systems, new sensors and instruments for onboard payload which facilitated the rise of UAV usage.
The use of UAV-based technology for environmental application in mountain regions are plenty, including vegetation monitoring to better understand how forests, orchards or pastures are affected by water deficit or other severe climate conditions, to understand the dynamics of mass wasting, such as landslides, and how the people can be warned in advance for these type of events, an also tourism applications including the mapping of cultural heritage sites such as buildings, monuments and national parks.
However, these applications are not an easy task and consist of many specialized activities such as the organization of flight operations dealing with legal flight normative, to analyze the risk of flight operations because the complexity of the terrain and weather conditions that may impair flight and data collection processes, logistical challenges including required men power, computing power and storage capacities for data processing, among others.
In this poster we will resume the experiences concerning data lifecycle of UAV operations using small platform equipped with RGB, hyperspectral and thermal sensors applied in mountain regions in South Tyrol, Italy, for near-continuous acquisition of ultra-high resolution imagery. The lifecycle will present the different stages and related activities including data collection, storage and organization, processing and analysis, data distribution and dissemination.