The interior of large coastal wetlands can be difficult to access, making monitoring the presence and extent of wetland vegetation communities/invasives in the wetland problematic. Collecting data on wetland vegetation community composition by way of transects across wetlands in boats or on foot can be challenging and may cause damage to sensitive vegetation or miss features/communities of interest. Small UAS (drones) offer a repeatable way to collect very high spatial resolution, multispectral aerial imagery, documenting presence/extent of species in a wetland without sending research staff into the wetland. UAS-acquired aerial imagery provides high spatial resolution (2 - 5 cm per pixel) imagery of a wetland, which can be collected as needed with no disturbance to sensitive plant communities. It simplifies the coordination of field crews with aerial imagery collection, allowing simultaneous collection of ground reference data and aerial imagery. Object-oriented image classification and expert photointerpretation techniques are applied to create a map of presence and extent of plant communities in the study areas. This presentation offers an application of UAS technology for monitoring plant communities at Little Portage River and Turtle Creek wetlands in the western basin of Lake Erie that are monitored by vegetation crews from the H2Ohio Wetland Monitoring Program.
