Use a Drone like a helicopter for reconnaissance.

The drone can save you huge amounts of time and money when it is used to see what your site looks like. A “bird’s eye view” for many projects is a great way to start the planning for restoration. Here are two examples of flying a drone to see the ponding on a salt marsh and for mapping beaver dams to assess blockages for anadromous fish migration. In a 20 minute flight, the drone can cover 50-75 acres and offer a permanent condition’s documentation of the site all in one go.  To do that on the ground would take days and you would still not have an accurate representation of the site.

A drone video is much more than a pretty movie.  There is a bunch more information associated with the file.  There is a track of the flight which can be accessed for mapping in GIS.  There is also data that you need to document like velocity, frame rate and angle of the gimbal.  The sensor has an array of pixels and when taken with the height off the ground you can make some very accurate measurements on the ground. You can also measure stream velocity using frame rate, elevation and sensor size. 

Once I do more research on these processes, I will update this page.