Introduction to drone use in plant science

Welcome! This site is intended to give step-by-step methods on the drone data processing pipeline… from planning missions, through getting data in a spreadsheet. Use whichever methods are helpful for you! And have fun!

If these methods are useful to you, we would be extremely grateful for a cite!

Parker, T.A., Celebioglu, B., Watson, M, and Gepts, P. “Drone methods and educational resources for plant science and agriculture”. In review.

The big idea: We will walk through all of this in more detail throughout the site!

1. Generate research questions, plan experiment, choose appropriate cameras and aircraft

     

2. Set up a flight plan: Many free and easy-to-use mission planning apps are available!

     

3. Fly! Collecting your data is often one of the simpler parts of the pipeline.

     

4. Process raw images into a 2D and 3D output files of your area of interest using photogrammetry (e.g., in Pix4D)

     

5. Export to GIS software such as QGIS. Particularly helpful QGIS processing functions include:

1. The “Georeferencer”: For aligning maps and other files from distinct flight dates or cameras
2. “Create Grid”: For delineating plots or other areas of interest
3. “Raster Calculator”: For generating vegetation indices, removing soil pixels, and making other helpful comparisons/magic tricks
4. “Zonal Statistics”: For extracting data to a table

     

6. Process extracted data in R or other software