Salisbury native part of team using drones to map effects of climate change in Peru
Published at midnight on Monday February 24, 2014
Sure, it looks like a spider on steroids. But a newly developed flying robot – which will soon fly over the Peruvian cloud forest for the first time – has potential benefits for everyone.
About a year and a half ago, a small team of Wake Forest researchers came up with the idea of using drones (also called unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs) to collect data on forest cover in the western Amazon region of South America. The area, about 3,000 miles wide and home to about 390 billion trees, is a major catalyst for Earth's climate and weather.
The researchers' goal: to better understand and predict the effects of climate change, which many scientists believe threatens our ecosystem and water supply.
“One thing a lot of people may not realize is that trees release an immense amount of water vapor into the atmosphere,” said Max Messinger, a Salisbury High graduate and Wake Forest biology graduate student who is assembling the drones. “A full-sized oak tree can release 50,000 gallons of water per year into the atmosphere. So when you start thinking about the scale of the Amazon basin, you have a global precipitation factor.”
Leaf canopy temperature is a key part of the research, Messinger said. He presented data on the subject at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December.
“The water released into the atmosphere in the Amazon affects precipitation and temperature across the globe. So by better understanding the temperature of leaves under different climate conditions, we can better understand how much water they will release into the atmosphere, how much CO2 they will remove from the atmosphere, and hopefully better understand what kind of effect it will have on the climate if the temperature rises two or three degrees.”
The ultra-remote location of the Peruvian cloud forest – on the slopes of the Andes, on the western edge of the Amazon rainforest – is difficult enough to access, let alone conduct research there. Additionally, Miles Silman, a biology professor at Wake Forest and director of its Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, said satellite data on temperature and thermal distribution in the Amazon do not provide the resolution needed to create sophisticated data models.
Silman, Messinger and Marcus Wright, director of the Wake Forest chemistry laboratory, therefore came up with the idea of a drone equipped with high-tech cameras and sensors. They applied for a grant and received funding from CEES and the National Science Foundation to assemble and test two different drones for use in the cloud forest.
Using global positioning data, compass coordinates and onboard stabilization systems, researchers enter relevant information into mission planning software, which generates the flight plan and transmits it to the aircraft. They then flip a switch to launch the drone.
Both versions of the drone have the ability to take photos from different viewpoints, allowing researchers to create three-dimensional models for laboratory studies. Both have their strengths and drawbacks.
The spider-shaped vehicle is an opticopter – an eight-motor, multi-rotor drone powered by standard amateur-grade batteries. “Before June 2012, only a few people were using them,” Silman said.
The opticopter, measuring about 3 feet in diameter, can reach speeds of about 15 mph for just 20 minutes at a time. Its main advantage is its ability to carry a conventional visible light or thermal imaging camera to collect data on temperature readings, leaf and flower characteristics, and even animal behavior.
The second, more conventional robot looks like an airplane, but with a wingspan of only 6 feet. Powered by a single electric motor, it can fly up to 80 km/h for more than an hour, but it cannot carry the sophisticated sensors that the opticopter has.
Researchers consider these factors, as well as the research objectives, when deciding which drone to use.
“We choose different research questions and then we choose the appropriate drone to fly it,” Silman said. “So in the mountains, with the thermal equipment, we will have an opticopter with multi-rotors and a thermal camera. When we are in the lowlands, we will fly planes (drones) over large areas of rainforests, looking for illegal mining and establishing baselines for affected vegetation types.”
Silman and Messinger are excited to see the opticopter and aircraft in action in Peru for the first time later this year. “We will travel to Peru every year, even several times a year, to do all kinds of different research,” Messinger said.
They like to be pioneers of sorts: “Drones when it comes to climate change are new,” Silman said. “But a lot of people are getting into ecological research (on drones). We were one of the first to get into it. There are so many potential uses in research. This field is booming.”
Messinger added: “The nice thing is that even though there are a significant number of people working on this, the research goals are so diverse between the different labs that use them that…we're looking at different habitats. We're trying to learn about different things.”
