PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
April 2015
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This step was achieved several months prior to fieldwork by
U.S. Embassy and USAID staff based in Guinea. Equally as
important as acquiring permission at the national government
level was informing local communities near the field sites about
the planned UAS mission. Because UAS in many parts of the
world may be perceived as synonymous with military drones,
it was critical that we educate the local population about the
mission. To accomplish this, prior to fieldwork PRADD staff
traveled to villages andmining sites to conduct a public relations
campaign to notify local populations that the UAS would be
flown in the area and to explain why it was being flown and
what to expect. During the flight missions the team immediately
downloaded and played video collected by the UAS for miners
and villagers as a follow-up to the information campaign and to
let them see their local landscapes from a birds-eye perspective.
These steps added significant time to the field mission, but were
essential to gaining the trust of local populations.
Other challenges are unique to flying a UAS in a developing
country or remote location. In Guinea, there was no consistent
source of power available for the team to recharge the LiPo
and camera batteries. Electricity was available for only a few
hours each night via generator, so the field team needed to plan
accordingly to procure enough fuel and generator time to charge
the equipment. In addition, due to the remote nature of the field
sites, the team needed to prepare in advance for foreseeable
maintenance problems, and thus brought spare parts for the
UAS, such as extra propellers, engines, and a basic toolset.
Weather conditions also posed challenges. While the UAS
can collect data under cloud cover, moderate to strong winds
and rain remain limiting factors and prohibit data collection.
Conversely, flying in bright sun conditions made maintaining
constant visual contact with the UAS, a necessary safety
parameter, more difficult. Finally, an interesting challenge
that was not foreseen by the team involved interactions with
territorial birds. In particular, the pied crow (
Corvus albus
),
found throughout sub-Saharan Africa, exhibited territorial
harassing behavior on more than one occasion with the UAS.
Given the small size of the UAS and the relatively large size of
the crow and other predatory birds in West Africa, interactions
of this nature are of a concern, though are perhaps unavoidable.
T
he
I
mplications of
UAS
T
echnology
for
ASM R
esearch
The very high-resolution imagery and videography collected
by the UAS is facilitating the development of image maps and
terrain models of the mining sites and surrounding areas in the
Forecariah Prefecture at an unprecedented scale. An abundance
of information is being gathered from these products, ranging
from the scope of mining activities, the location of mining within
the landscape, the amount of activity at each site, the impact of
mining on the surrounding environment, and the type of mining
activities being conducted at the time of image collection. The
immediate application of this information will be to assist the
PRADD project in working with the Guinean government to
select appropriate zones to parcel for artisanal mining based
on diamond potential, an important step towards formalization
and resource governance. Interpretation of the data will also
assist with the identification of abandoned mine sites that can
be remediated into other income-generating activities, such as
fish farming and vegetable gardens, thus helping to reduce the
long-term environmental degradation caused by ASM.
We are only beginning to uncover the many potential
applications of UAS technology for environmental remote
sensing. For ASM research, it will greatly enhance our ability
to map and monitor difficult-to-access and dynamic mining
sites. The level of detail garnered from UAS flight data is
unparalleled and will serve diverse purposes, from helping
governments and local communities allocate land for mining,
to enabling researchers to identify landforms with greater
diamond potential. Small UAS technology is still a relatively
new innovation and therefore still faces challenges; however,
UAS provide many advantages over traditional satellite
remote sensing, and its applications will only expand as the
technology continues to grow.
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eferences
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