Aerial photographs

Aerial photographs are an important tool to survey agricultural field patterns in a research area and monitor changes in land use in the course of a vegetation period, or over extended times. A rather low-cost technology used by the work group are small, remotely controlled aircrafts equipped with a camera, as for example drones or hexacopters.

A hexacopter is a small helicopter (about the size of a soup dish) with six radially arranges rotors. It carries a platform with a camera oriented downwards. It can rise vertically up to 300 m, move by remote control over a designated experimetal area, and take series of pictures of it.

The procedure is similar if the camera is attached to a model aircraft which is then referred to as drone. This kind of visual documentation of field research areas is also used for geo-referencing sampling points.

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