Tag Archives: Mapping

Drones used to assess health of Antarctic vegetation

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Below is a press release about the Methods paper ‘Unmanned aircraft system advances health mapping of fragile polar vegetation‘ taken from the University of Wollongong.

New method faster, more efficient and less damaging to the environment

A team of researchers from the University of Wollongong (UOW) and the University of Tasmania has developed a new method for assessing the health of fragile Antarctic vegetation using drones, which they say could be used to improve the efficiency of ecological monitoring in other environments as well.

The researchers have written about their method in an article published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, a scientific journal of the British Ecological Society.

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Digitizing Historical Land-use Maps with HistMapR

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Habitat destruction and degradation represent serious threats to biodiversity, and quantification of land-use change over time is important for understanding the consequences of these changes to organisms and ecosystem service provision.

Historical land-use maps are important for documenting how habitat cover has changed over time, but digitizing these maps is a time consuming process. HistMapR is an R package designed to speed up the digitization process, and in this video we take an example map to show you how the method works.

Digitization is fast, and agreement with manually digitized maps of around 80–90% meets common targets for image classification. We hope that the ability to quickly classify large areas of historical land use will promote the inclusion of land-use change into analyses of biodiversity, species distributions and ecosystem services.

This video is based on the Applications article ‘HistMapR: Rapid digitization of historical land-use maps in R‘ by Auffret et al. This article is freely available to anyone (no subscription required).

The package is hosted on GitHub and example scripts can be downloaded from Figshare.