Inspired by our transparent way of GPS-mapping our more than 2000 installed Zoë-pumps we knew we had to apply the same principle and expand it to show and document our tree planting projects.
Now we have an elegant solution: We create GPS-Polygons of planting sites by walking around it with a simple smart phone app. We then import these boundary files into the drone mission planning app and fly a drone over the planting site capturing thousands of images.
These are then stitched into a large photogrammetric map that can transparently show and document landscape change through the work happening on the ground. Additionally all workers inspecting the sites take thousands of GPS-photos which are displayed on our custom built map as well.
We are lucky enough to have a malawian team that is highly skilled and trained well enough so that we can 100% rely on their work and the results they deliver.
Apart of that it is important to have reasonable drone laws in a country, as well as having access to a drone and a pilot.
In the very beginning of the drone monitoring we had to research the best workflow to map an area with no network terrain-aware. As this took a lot of time and turned out to be actually not even that complicated we wanted to share our knowledge and created a learning series on drone monitoring in cooperation with One Tree Planted and it is now freely available on youtube and covers all there is to know:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNd5k-Dy6I3qZeRh2Pj1WQ