Visualizing beaver habitat with high resolution data

To illustrate the advantages of mapping with drones we decided to acquire imagery of an active beaver habitat to highlight historic beaver dams and lodges in a way that is not possible with satellite imagery. Recent beaver (Castor canadensis) habitat is often readily identified in satellite imagery but historic activity is often not. Identifying older and less visible features can require extensive time on the ground which increases risks to field crews and costs to programs.

We found that cross-referencing customized orthoimagery and elevation models allows remote identification of features otherwise  while minimizing time on the ground.

A Corax flight team acquired imagery of the selected area of operations with a quadcopter drone and collected DGPS ground control points. We then processed the data with photogrammetry software to produce data products we thought would be useful for this study.

Combining our custom orthoimagery and elevation data made habitat features visible that would have otherwise remained hidden due to overgrowth and the flooding and draining processes of new beaver activity.

Only features made obvious by our process were outlined for this study but the abundance of historic features led us to believe that there are still more to be identified. We plan to reacquire higher resolution imagery for more  throughout the 2020 field season to quantify new beaver activity and possibly reveal more historic features.