On the right flightpath: Lakehead faculty finds innovative uses for drones.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Thunder Bay

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have quickly become a cornerstone teaching and analytical tool for professors and students in the faculty of natural resources at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay.

UAVs--also known as drones --are have been a transformative data-gathering vehicle for both Lakehead researchers and their clients with its myriad of applications in forestry, mining, agriculture and various eco-friendly uses.

"We've started realizing this is a technology which can have the same impact as GPS did," said Alex Bilyk, former Lakehead graduate student-turned-private consultant. "GPS fundamentally changed the way we collected information in the bush."

The faculty adopted UAVs about three years ago to further enhance its study of aerial photography in its natural resource planning programs.

"We wanted to find those situations where there were some niche markets where a drone would be more effective," said Bilyk.

The first UAV they've experimented with was a modified movie industry drone, a bulky, seven-foot long, gas-powered drone, supplied by an Ottawa company.

Since then, they've amassed a mini air armada of six aircraft: three fixed-wing and three rotary-wing, the largest being an eight-bladed copter with a 25-pound lift capacity. All are capable of autonomous flight.

In a Lakehead lab, Bilyk and Ulf Runesson, the faculty dean, assemble drones from kits ordered from China and outfit them with standard 24-megapixel cameras shooting both video and still photography.

"We lift and land them, but they fly themselves for the photo missions," said Runesson.

At their 3,000-foot grass airstrip off Highway 61, about 15 minutes from campus, the UAVs are proving to be a powerful technology in the hands of students and professionals alike.

"What drones do is democratize the access to information," said Bilyk, who is training a logging contractor on how to use UAVs while also teaching a Lakehead course this fall on using drones in natural resources management.

Beyond just measuring tree heights and identifying species, their extensive video library shows that drones can be deployed in forest management scenarios such as free-to-grow surveys or for pinpointing GPS-tagged bundles of logs under the snow after the feller-bunchers have gone through.

They can be used to conduct volume metrics at landfills, for wood chip and aggregate piles, and for conservation purposes like inspecting bird nesting sites or counting wildlife.

"You'd be surprised what...