Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a Supporting Tool of Classic Land Surveying in Hard-to-Reach Areas

The paper presents issues related to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to monitor natural forest resources and to estimate the post-fire surfaces located in forests, as an example of hard-to-reach areas for classic surveying surveys. The use of drones as a tool for geodetic measurements is becoming more and more popular, however, processing data acquired in this way requires proper analysis. The article proposes a procedure for processing images provided by drones to estimate the effects of natural disasters and exemplifies it with experimental data obtained in a forest area located in western Poland (Europe). The presented methodology concerned the automatic identification of post-fire areas in natural forest resources and verification of the results by comparison with the results of classical geodetic tachymetric measurements. The results prove the usefulness of images acquired by UAVs for identifying and determining the size of areas struck by natural disasters. At the same time, data from UAVs can be a reference base for geodetic measurements and a database for institutions managing endangered areas.