Development and Evaluation of a Low-Cost Process to Support Vegetation Classification Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

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East Coast Aquatics is a Nova Scotia based biological consulting firm that specializes in conducting wetland and stream habitat assessment and monitoring, designing and implementing restoration of habitats, and assessing and monitoring the biological communities of plants, turtles, fish and micro-invertebrates. Vegetation classification is the process of classifying and mapping the vegetation in an area of interest. The traditional method for surveying a vegetation site requires a sampling approach using a number of quadrats deployed throughout the study area. A quadrat is a frame that is used to mark out a specific area to be sampled. The issue East Coast Aquatics is having is that conducting these manual assessments are time consuming and labor intensive, occur in remote areas, can disturb the habitat, and the accuracy of the assessment varies based on the number of sampling points used to represent the entire area. As a result, East Coast Aquatics would like to collaborate with NSCC's Centre of Geographic Sciences Applied Research to explore the potential for using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to improve the quality and efficiency of vegetation classification. This project will explore cost effective approaches to all stages of the classification process including data collection, image processing and image classification.