How to land a fixed-wing drone in a dense forest

Answer: Giant butterfly nets!

Ryan Lynch and Sebastian Kohn have been using an expensive fixed-wing drone, owned and operated by  Pablo Melo and Diego Andrade of Drone And GIS, to map our Manduriacu Reserve in exquisite detail. I’ll show some of those results later as they are processed and assembled. Fixed-wing drones can travel much farther than electric helicopter-drones. But there are some practical difficulties to this work. How do you land one of these fragile multi-thousand-dollar things in a forest full of trees? This is the technique that Pablo and Diego and Sebastian and Ryan used. So far it has worked.

The drone rides a mule to the launch site. Photo: Sebastian Kohn.

The small clearing around the Manduriacu cabin is big enough to launch the drone but not big enough, or flat enough, to land it. Photo: Sebastian Kohn.

Off it goes! Photo: Sebastian Kohn.

The drone takes detailed photos of the canopy. Courtesy Sebastian Kohn.

Thanks to Pablo Melo and Diego Andrade and their company, Drone And GIS, for their hard work to map this reserve.

 

More posts on the Manduriacu Reserve:

https://ecomingafoundation.wordpress.com/2016/07/27/a-lost-toad-rediscovered-we-join-the-effort-to-protect-rhaebo-olallai/

https://ecomingafoundation.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/jaguar-returns-to-our-manduriacu-reserve/

https://ecomingafoundation.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/manduriacu-reserve-from-the-air/

https://ecomingafoundation.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/the-pacarana-dinomys-branickii/

Lou Jost, Fundacion EcoMinga