Developing a lowcost Vertical Take Off and Landing Unmanned Aerial System for centimetric monitoring of biodiversity the Fontainebleau Forest case

Abstract

Monitoring vegetation dynamics is a very important task for biodiversity conservation, especially in the Global Change context where many natural habitats are threatened with extinction or reduced to small areas. Remote sensing (aerial or spatial) has played a key role in this monitoring for years. With space imagery, the main limitation is actually due to the metric resolution which is not well adapted for estimating the processes of changes occurring in areas where the number species, visible only in few places, is shrinking, like in the heathland habitat in Fontainebleau Forest case. For aerial imagery, the main problem is the cost of a specific mission or the availability of the plane or the pilot. We propose in this article another solution: the use of a home-made Unmanned Vertical Take Off and Landing Aerial System, which is a good compromise between the spatial and aerial solutions, and test the validity and the robustness of the tools developed for the management of natural habitat on a specific area of the Fontainebleau Forest.