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Sources:
Dale Schinstock, 785-532-2608, dales@mne.ksu.edu;
and Jay Ham, 785-532-6119, jayham@k-state.edu
News release prepared by: Kay Garrett, 785-532-3238
Tuesday,
May 9, 2006
K-STATERS
DESIGN AND BUILD A LOW-COST REMOTE SENSING TOOL FOR ENVIRONMENTAL
STUDIES
MANHATTAN
-- A Kansas State University research team is prototyping a small,
inexpensive remote-control plane as a sensing tool, also known as
an unmanned aerial vehicle, to collect environmental data. The team
plans to test it over the Konza Prairie Biological Station near
Manhattan this summer.
If
the sensing tool performs as the team hopes, it will be made available
to climate scientists, who would then be able to reconstruct it
to obtain high-resolution images and reliable data.
The
development of the sensing tool is part of a three-year research
instrumentation project that began in fall 2005 with a $597,000
National Science Foundation grant.
The
researchers are Dale Schinstock, assistant professor of mechanical
engineering; Jay Ham, a professor of agronomy and an environmental
biophysicist; and Doug Goodin, professor of geography and a remote
sensing expert. Schinstock is in charge of developing the airframe
and the remote control systems for the sensing tool, while Ham and
Goodin will put it to work once it's flight worthy.
According
to the researchers, the sensing tool/unmanned aerial vehicle should
be capable of "flying low and slow" just a few feet above
the ground. The onboard payload of digital cameras, spectral radiometers
and other remote sensing instruments will produce high-resolution
images and data about small groups of plants and their environmental
stress level.
At
just 15 pounds with payload, the bantamweight hobby airframe with
an 80-inch wingspan has been modified to house the remote sensing
instruments in a carbon fiber-reinforced fuselage. A K-State graduate
student designed and built an autopilot for first phases of the
project. However, the researchers have opted for incorporating a
commercially available autopilot so the sensing tool can be reproduced
easily by others.
"This
will be very easy to use. Its weight and size allow it to be launched
by hand and flopped down in the grass for landings," Schinstock
said.
"Furthermore,
we're relying on an electric propulsion system that makes it extremely
reliable and easy to use," he said. "Battery power eliminates
emissions and messy fuels that could compromise the data collection
systems and greatly reduces vibration."
According
to Schinstock, the remote sensing tool will meet a need shared by
thousands of environmental scientists worldwide. For just a few
thousand dollars, researchers will have a way to collect data for
small ecosystem sites at low altitudes and at very slow speeds.
Until now, climate research has required costly, piloted airplanes
and satellites for earth's images and data, he said.
"Small
remote-control planes can be put to work in a variety of environmental
settings," Ham said. "We want them to be comparatively
cheap to build and operate. They'll provide a data-collection tool
that offers tremendous flexibility to users. We're really developing
a new tool for researchers that will allow them to go out and comprehensively
map the vegetation in a field-sized area, for example, one square
section."
Schinstock
said the concept of using the sensing tool for nonmilitary applications
opens up many possibilities for collecting reliable data in tricky
or dangerous settings, such as studying dispersal of a smoke plume
during a prairie fire; checking smokestack emissions; counting livestock
in the pens at a feedlot; or checking crop fields for problem areas,
for example.
"We
keep thinking of new civilian uses for it," Ham said. He also
said it will help his own research, which focuses on measuring the
movement of gases between the prairie and the atmosphere.
Ham
collects data via a mini-network of six meteorological towers on
the Konza Prairie and the Rannells Flint Hills Prairie Preserve.
The Konza towers are a component of the regional network, Ameriflux.
Counterpart networks in Europe, Asia and Oceania also collect ecological
data, which then flows to FLUXNET central locations, including Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, for computer modeling the climate.
"Our
role is to study the tallgrass prairie ecosystem and how land management
impacts that ecosystem. In Kansas, we're interested in how management
decisions like grazing and burning, coupled with year-to-year weather
variations, impact the movement of carbon dioxide between the surface
and the atmosphere," Ham said.
"Through
these networks we're trying to get a good understanding of all the
major ecosystems in the world: grasslands versus Amazon forests
versus African savannah versus tundra in Alaska," Ham said.
"The
earth's atmosphere links all cultures and nations. By that, I mean
that carbon dioxide emitted in China, for example, can impact the
vegetation in North America or Europe and vice versa. Any decisions
about climate change have to be based on a complete global analysis,"
he said.
"Having
this remote sensing tool will support a lot of environmental research
that's already going on in Kansas and also elsewhere," Ham
said. "Because it can fly as low as 15 feet and as slow as
30 miles per hour if necessary, we're going to be able to see details
that we cannot measure with a regular piloted aircraft.
"I
think it will be possible not only to be able to say how much and
what species of vegetation are there, but more importantly, to know
the stress status of the plants: Is there water stress? Are the
plants photosynthesizing at a high rate? We should be able to discern
that information down to pixels representing less than a square
foot of land area."
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