Small Unmanned Airships for Agriculture, Forestry and OtherLand Use (AFOLU) programs in Latin America

摘要

In the next years, agricultural, forestry andforestation/reforestation programs in Latin America will employ inlarger scale aerial vehicles to collect, analyze and making modelingfor biomass and soil characterization. In this case, unmannedremote sensing platforms could substantially change the costs andreliability of monitoring and mitigation projects, enabling greaterparticipation even from small-scale agriculture in localcommunities across the region. The primary tool to map andestimate land cover or land use at the regional and local level couldbe a low-cost, small unmanned airship, which represents a bettercost-effective platform not needing specialized airfields, includingenergy efficient electric power plant and dependable new soilanalyticaltechniques that use visible-near-infrared reflectance(VNIR) and Hyper-spectral camera systems. According to theprevious assessment, it is the purpose of this paper to propose theembrace of unmanned airship technology as an affordable remoteperception and mapping platform in accordance with LatinAmerican boundary conditions given by the economic andecological circumstances.