Day 19

Similar to yesterday I went back out into the field with a quadcopter and a pentax optio and tried to get imagery of the native plant Hala which grows near the ridge lines/ areas that have low disturbance. Much of the time the cloud cover, wind or rain delayed our flight and we were only able to get 2 flights in the whole morning and afternoon. I spent the entire night using photoscan and trying to mosaic my images to the best of my ability/computers ability. After dinner I also had the opportunity to talk to Mike the graduate student and Dr. Lee about what my actual focus would be. It is a good thing we talked because I wanted to focus on using UAV/UAS imagery while he was under the impression I was going to continue to work with the WV-2 Imagery.

Continuing my thesis research, I believe that satellite imagery is inherently disadvantaged to UAV/UAS imagery because of cloud cover, long re-visit times and low spatial resolution. Because of these disadvantages I believe the future in vegetation imagery is by using UAVs. Although they still lack the strong multispectral sensors in satellites, the higher spatial resolution is still currently better for a species level classification.