The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is a leader in the use of small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) to fill the critical data gap faced by federal agencies in managing natural and cultural resources on public lands. Use of these platforms enables agencies to collect very large scale aerial (VLSA) imagery at sub-centimeter spatial resolutions, which is necessary to capture data for species composition and to provide field office personnel with data that are relevant on a localized project scale. VLSA imagery can be used to support decision-making for land management operations for applications including invasive weed control, micro-soil erosion monitoring, verification of the populations of potentially endangered species, and the rehabilitation of lands damaged by wildland fires. Additionally, sUAS represents a cost effective method for capturing VLSA imagery in locations that are difficult and/or unsafe to access with traditional field sampling strategies. BLM's Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) program relies in part upon an integrated remote sensing approach that leverages fine, moderate, and coarse scales of imagery to provide geospatial information that can be used to document land cover changes, cumulative impacts, unauthorized disturbances, and land treatment activities at the field, regional, and national scale. The AIM terrestrial indicators are comprised of a standardized set of quantitative methods that can be applied across all lands and ecosystems managed by the BLM for the measurement and analysis of key ecosystem attributes and their relevant status. The BLM has identified sUAS as an optimal imaging solution for capturing AIM's local and plot-level remotely sensed data requirements. VLSA imagery collected from sUAS platforms has been demonstrated to be an effective tool to supplement the sampling of large landscapes in order to generate estimates of rangeland attributes consistent with field-based measurements, and as validation information to support broader scale remote sensing efforts.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.