E4 PhD student Apithanny Bourne is studying the use of high resolution imaging and remote sensing to assess the quality of pollinator habitats such as floral field margins and species rich grasslands. Loss of floral habitat is the driving factor behind pollinator decline in the United Kingdom. In less than a century, over 98% of flower-rich hay meadows have been lost and monitoring remaining sites using traditional survey techniques remains expensive and labour intensive. Developing an easily deployable and cost-effective method for assessing habitat quality could be an essential tool for results-based agri-environment schemes and the long-term monitoring of nature reserves. E4 PhD student Apithanny Bourne is studying a number of existing species-rich grasslands and newly created wildflower field margins in an agricultural setting. Alongside traditional pollinator transects surveys, she is exploring remotely sensing the abundance of floral resources for pollinators using high resolution drone imagery and multispectral sensing. Apithanny will utilise the photographic and multispectral data for habitat assessment both through species distribution mapping and through direct quantification of floral resources (counts of flowering heads) at various stages of the growing season. Assessment of critical spatial resolution is also important in defining the technical requirements of future 'operationalised' solutions that could be deployed on land management scales. Apithanny's work has used ARI's DJI Mavic 2 Pro, Mavic 3 Multispectral and Matrice 300 RTK drones, with the 45 Mp DJI P1 camera on the Matrice 300 RTK, providing an exceptional range of data. We have provided both training and equipment loan and directly supported data acquisition, along with our specialist data processing facilities. This article was published on 2024-06-25
