Cost-effective drone monitoring and evaluating toolkits for stream habitat health: development and application.

ABSTRACT: Effective monitoring for stream habitat health is essential for sustainable restoration and management to conserve ecosystem services. Traditional in situ surveying with multi-metric indices is widely used by state and federal agencies but is often labor-intensive and spatially limited. To address these challenges, this study introduces a suite of cost-effective drone-based monitoring toolkits that integrate automated flight-route design, Structure-from-Motion (SfM) image reconstruction, and multi-metric index (MMI) computation. The toolkits form an end-to-end workflow for quantitative habitat evaluation, enabling centimeter-scale mapping and standardized MMI scoring based on Wisconsin DNR and EPA guidelines. The toolkits were examined at Black Earth Creek, Wisconsin, where high- and low-e

SUBMITTER: Wang W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12680738 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature