The staggering uptake of Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) commonly referred to as drones has led some to coin the term ‘the Drone Age’ in reference to the current era [Economist 2015]. In parallel, the integration of Structure from Motion (SfM) and multi-view stereo (MVS) algorithms into the standard workflow of digital photogrammetry has led to a series of software products that can restitute topography from imagery with an unprecedented level of automation and ease. The result for the environmental monitoring community has been a democratization of high-resolution 3D spatial data collection, which has transformed how researchers can document and visualize environmental processes and change at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

The core of the schedule will be devoted to a two-day conference highlighting some of the cutting edge research that is being done with UAS at Dartmouth and in the broader environmental monitoring community. The first day and half of the second day will be devoted to talks. The afternoon of the second day would be reserved for discussions around the current challenges in UAS remote sensing, which includes the lack of community-driven standards for data collection, accuracy assessment, and metadata reporting.