Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) have become a basic tool, enabling us to explore and document our surroundings as never before. Powdermill scientists took the lead in developing drone-based photogrammetry, a method that combines hundreds or thousands of photos taken from different angles, to create a 3D model of the forest at the level of an entire stand. A trick we used was to eliminate the crowns so that we can more accurately model the tree trunks (which is why they look like they are dead, no twigs!) A model of one of our research plots was composed of 23 million reference points, and the dimensions of the trees is correct to within about 3 cm. You can vist the model here:
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