Drones: technology with a promising future in forest management

Abstract

Climate variability points out important challenges that forest ecosystems are currently facing. In order to better understanding their vital processes, it is necessary to have cutting-edge technologies and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) play a fundamental role. Its applications have been extended to civilian use, natural disaster response, humanitarian action, and earth science research. Although UAV have been used for different tasks and services, there is a lack of information on the state of the art of methods, uses and trends in forest management. This paper contributes to knowledge in terms of research volume over time, differentiated by journals and countries; most influential papers and authors; scientific collaboration networks; types of vegetation and fields of study; hardware and software that are relevant for forest monitoring. The results showed 117 scientific papers published from 2012 to 2019, mainly in China and USA including five clusters of scientific collaborations. The studies focused on individual attributes of forest structure, inventories, and vigor forest monitoring. Also, temperate forests were mostly studied around the world. The rotorcrafts drones were the most used with RGB sensor from DJI as the dominant market leader. Photoscan was the photogrammetry software more applied on forestry research. Lastly, we confirm that UAV are exponentially expanding over the last five years. In Mexico, this potential is expected to increase, taking advantage of its mega diversity, great forestry tradition and the researchers that are becoming specialized.