Poster: Drones can revolutionize research and monitoring…can’t they? (NERRS/NERRA Annual Meeting 2020)

Project Lead Brandon Puckett (North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve) gives an introduction to "Bridging the Gap between Quadrats and Satellites: Assessing Utility of Drone-based Imagery to Enhance Emergent Vegetation Biomonitoring," aka "Drone the SWMP," a catalyst project funded in

Monitoring plays a central role in detecting climate and anthropogenic stressors and associated changes in wetlands. There is a need for wetland monitoring programs to bridge the gap between ground-based surveys, which can miss important spatial heterogeneity and cause wetland disturbance, a

With funding from the NERRS Science Collaborative, scientists from 12 biogeographically diverse Reserves compared fluorescence measurements taken by the YSI EXO TAL sensor to extracted chlorophyll concentrations processed in the lab.

Standardized protocols for sensor-based chlorophyll monitoring are now available for use by staff around the system to implement high frequency chlorophyll monitoring at their reserves.

Research staff from 12 reserves assessed sensor performance by comparing field and laboratory sensor measurements to concentrations of chlorophyll extracted from water samples.

Project Lead Nikki Dix (Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve) gives a 5-minute introduction to "Refining Techniques for High-frequency Monitoring of Chlorophyll Alpha in the NERRS," a catalyst project funded in 2020 by the NERRS Science Collaborative.

This resource contains the presenter slides, Q&A responses, recording, and presenter bios from the June 2022 webinar "Drone the SWMP: Assessing the Utility of Drones for Monitoring Coastal Wetlands."