RESEARCH ARTICLE Using Unmanned Aerial vehicles for Rangelands: Current Applications and Future Potentials

High resolution aerial photographs have important rangeland applications, such as monitoring vegetation change, devel-oping grazing strategies, determining rangeland health, and assessing remediation treatment effectiveness. Acquisition of high resolution images by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has certain advantages over piloted aircraft missions, includ-ing lower cost, improved safety, flexibility in mission plan-ning, and closer proximity to the target. Different levels of remote sensing data can be combined to provide more com-prehensive information: 15-30 m resolution imaging from space-borne sensors for determining uniform landscape units; < 1 m satellite or aircraft data to assess the pattern of eco-logical states in an area of interest; 5 cm UAV images to measure gap and patch sizes as well as percent bare soil and vegetation ground cover; and < 1 cm ground-based boo