Darren TurnerUniversity of Tasmania · School of Land and Food
Darren Turner
BSc (Hons)
About
33
Publications
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Introduction
Darren Turner currently works at Geography and Spatial Sciences, University of Tasmania. Darren does research in Geography and Geoinformatics (GIS). Their current project is 'Monitoring Continental Antarctic Vegetation'.
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (33)
Uncooled thermal infrared sensors are increasingly being deployed on unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for agriculture, forestry, wildlife surveys, and surveillance. The acquisition of thermal data requires accurate and uniform testing of equipment to ensure precise temperature measurements. We modified an uncooled thermal infrared sensor, specifically...
With an increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires across the globe and resultant changes to long-established fire regimes, the mapping of fire severity is a vital part of monitoring ecosystem resilience and recovery. The emergence of unoccupied aircraft systems (UAS) and compact sensors (RGB and LiDAR) provide new opportunities to map fir...
In recent years, Unoccupied Aircraft Systems (UAS) have been used to capture information on forest structure in unprecedented detail. Pioneering studies in this field have shown that high spatial resolution images and Light Detecting And Ranging (LiDAR) data captured from these platforms provide detailed information describing the dominant tree ele...
Thermal infrared cameras provide unique information on surface temperature that can benefit a range of environmental, industrial and agricultural applications. However, the use of uncooled thermal cameras for field and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based data collection is often hampered by vignette effects, sensor drift, ambient temperature influe...
Key message
High-density airborne laser scanning can be used to generate metrics that help characterize and differentiate the structure of Douglas-fir across three genetic levels at three different planting spacings.
Abstract
In British Columbia, Canada, Douglas-fir [Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco] selective breeding is used to develop genet...
Hyperspectral systems integrated on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) provide unique opportunities to conduct high-resolution multitemporal spectral analysis for diverse applications. However, additional time-consuming rectification efforts in postprocessing are routinely required, since geometric distortions can be introduced due to UAV movements dur...
Antarctic moss communities, found in the spatially fragmented and fragile moss beds, can serve as indicators of the regional impacts of climate change. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) carrying visible and near infrared (VNIR) sensors are a suitable nonintrusive mapping platform. UAS deployments in Antarctica are, due to weather and logistical restric...
The sub-alpine and alpine Sphagnum peatlands in Australia are geographically constrained to poorly drained areas c. 1000 m a.s.l. Sphagnum is an important contributor to the resilience of peatlands; however, it is also very sensitive to fire and often shows slow recovery after being damaged. Recovery is largely dependent on a sufficient water suppl...
Moss beds are one of very few terrestrial vegetation types that can be found on the Antarctic continent and as such mapping their extent and monitoring their health is important to environmental managers. Across Antarctica, moss beds are experiencing changes in health as their environment changes. As Antarctic moss beds are spatially fragmented wit...
In this study, we assess two push broom hyperspectral sensors as carried by small (10–15 kg) multi-rotor Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). We used a Headwall Photonics micro-Hyperspec push broom sensor with 324 spectral bands (4–5 nm FWHM) and a Headwall Photonics nano-Hyperspec sensor with 270 spectral bands (6 nm FWHM) both in the VNIR spectral ra...
This study investigates the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to measure and monitor structural properties of forests. Two remote sensing techniques, airborne laser scanning (ALS) and structure from motion (SfM) were tested to capture three-dimensional structural information from a small multi-rotor UAV platform. A case study is presente...
As climate change reshapes the Earth's polar regions, scientists turn to drone-mounted cameras to measure sea ice. One expedition found out that flying drones near Antarctica isn't easy.
Alpine areas pose challenges for many existing remote sensing methods for snow depth retrieval, thus leading to uncertainty in water forecasting and budgeting. Herein, we present the results of a field campaign conducted in Tasmania, Australia in 2013 from which estimates of snow depth were derived using a low-cost photogrammetric approach on-board...
In this study, we used an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to collect a time series of high-resolution images over four years at seven epochs to assess landslide dynamics. Structure from Motion (SfM) was applied to create Digital Surface Models (DSMs) of the landslide surface with an accuracy of 4-5 cm in the horizontal and 3-4 cm in the vertical dire...
In recent times, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as tools for environmental remote sensing has become more commonplace. Compared to traditional airborne remote sensing, UAVs can provide finer spatial resolution data (up to 1 cm/pixel) and higher temporal resolution data. For the purposes of vegetation monitoring, the use of multiple sens...
Mosses, the dominant flora of East Antarctica, show evidence of drying in recent decades, likely due to the regional effects of climate change. Given the relatively small area that such moss beds occupy, new tools are needed to map and monitor these fragile ecosystems in sufficient detail. In this study, we collected low altitude aerial photography...
Micro-unmanned aerial vehicles often collect a large amount of images when mapping an area at an ultrahigh reso-lution. A direct georeferencing technique potentially eliminates the need for ground control points. In this paper, we developed a camera–global positioning system (GPS) module to allow the synchronization of camera exposure with the airf...
The most abundant photosynthetically active plants growing along the
rocky Antarctic shore are mosses of three species: Schistidium
antarctici, Ceratodon purpureus, and Bryum pseudotriquetrum. Even though
mosses are well adapted to the extreme climate conditions, their
existence in Antarctica depends strongly on availability of liquid water
from sn...
The Antarctic continent has experienced major changes in temperature,
wind speed and stratospheric ozone levels during the last 50 years. In a
manner similar to tree rings, old growth shoots of Antarctic mosses, the
only plants on the continent, also preserve a climate record of their
surrounding environment. This makes them an ideal bio-indicator...
In this study, we present a flexible, cost-effective, and accurate method to monitor landslides using a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to collect aerial photography. In the first part, we apply a Structure from Motion (SfM) workflow to derive a 3D model of a landslide in southeast Tasmania from multi-view UAV photography. The geometric accurac...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are an exciting new remote sensing tool capable of acquiring high resolution spatial data. Remote sensing with UAVs has the potential to provide imagery at an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. The small footprint of UAV imagery, however, makes it necessary to develop automated techniques to geometrically...
We present the development of a low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Light Detecting and Ranging (UAV-LiDAR) system and an accompanying workflow to produce 3D point clouds. UAV systems provide an unrivalled combination of high temporal and spatial resolution datasets. The TerraLuma UAV-LiDAR system has been developed to take advantage of these properti...
Remote sensing mimics human sensory perception from a distance (Drury 1993, p. iiv) and is one of the most powerful tools available for the collection of detailed geological data over large surface areas. Geoscientists in both industry and research increasingly require accurate, high resolution geological maps and orientation measurements but the c...
This study is the first to use an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for mapping moss beds in Antarctica. Mosses can be used as
indicators for the regional effects of climate change. Mapping and monitoring their extent and health is therefore important. UAV
aerial photography provides ultra-high resolution spatial data for this purpose. We developed a t...
This study is the first to use an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for mapping moss beds in Antarctica. Mosses can be used as indicators for the regional effects of climate change. Mapping and monitoring their extent and health is therefore important. UAV aerial photography provides ultra-high resolution spatial data for this purpose. The aim of this...
A survey of icebergs using satellite radar images has been made in the Seasonal Sea Ice Zone [SSIZ] of East Antarctica in the sector between longitudes 50˚E and 145˚E. These data provide information on the spatial distribution and size statistics of icebergs near the coast in areas not often visited by ship-board observers, and close to their sourc...
A technique is described to map surface UV-B irradiance (erythemal
ultraviolet irradiance) for a section of the Antarctic coast bounded by
latitudes 54°-69°S; 140°-160°E. Daily NOAA/AVHRR images
have been acquired for this region over four consecutive austral spring,
summer and autumn season (November-April), starting in 1990. A model
developed by...
This study is the first to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for mapping moss beds in Antarctica. Mosses can be used as indicators for the regional effects of climate change. Mapping and monitoring their extent and health is therefore important. UAV aerial photography provides ultra-high resolution spatial data for this purpose. In addition, we...
Projects
Projects (3)
The aim of the project is to address the complex problem of biodiversity assessment by developing the fundamental science to enable UAS remote sensing technology to bridge the scale gap between field and larger-scale data – advancing the foundations for effectively quantifying the rapid changes we now see in global vegetation and associated biodiversity.
1. To identify the optimal SIF retrieval technique from spectra collected with a high-end Ocean Optics QE Pro spectrometer;
2. To calibrate the SIF signal based on LED reference panels;
3. To assess the influence of crop structure, UAV flying height, and sun angle on the SIF signal;
4. To compare UAV-SIF observations to ground-based measurements of plant fluorescence.
We have been monitoring two sites in the Windmill Islands for over a decade, and are seeing how the vegetation health and species composition change over time. We have developed a protocol for monitoring Antarctic Vegetation in a minimally destructive manner, using quadrat photography and object based image analysis (OBIA) techniques to perform semi-automated classification of vegetation health. We use microscopy of tiny field samples to identify species presence/absence to determine species composition.
