This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: It took one drone, 300 million laser data points and seven teams of students on foot to map Wake Forest University's trees. Led by Ovidiu Csillik, an assistant professor of remote sensing in the environment and sustainability studies program, the project produced a publicly accessible, interactive 3D digital map of more than 1,000 trees and helped the university earn international accreditation as a Level II arboretum.
"This is a collaboration between many departments and people on campus from the biology department, the Office of Sustainability and our campus arborist, together with the students," Csillik said. The new inventory currently covers 90 acres (36 hectares) in the central area of the university's 350-acre (142-hectare) campus. A click on the map reveals individual trees by location, common name and height.
Zooming in shows the name of each species, like southern magnolia or Kwanzan cherry. A larger dot indicates a taller tree. The tallest tree is a willow oak behind Winston Hall, reaching nearly 109 feet (33 meters).
Students in Csillik's "Drones for Environmental Applications" class flew unmanned aircraft over campus following a grid pattern. By overlapping flight paths, the data from the drones could be stitched together digitally to create a complete picture of the canopy. "After doing a LiDAR scan of the campus, you have this point cloud of data, a bunch of little dots essentially outlining everything you scan," said Mia Berens, a student in the class who also works in Csillik's remote sensing lab.
"Honestly, the trickier part is once you have the data, filtering it out and getting rid of the points you don't need so you just have the trees." The students gathered data last September and again in March. "In the summer, you get all the points of the leaves, and in the winter, there's a better view of the canopy and all the branches," Berens said. "If you overlay the summer and winter points, you have a really great outline of exactly what the trees look like.
I realized I really do like data. I feel like the future is there with environmental science. That's where the world is heading, so it's pretty smart to get ahead of it and learn about it now.
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