Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Forest Ecology and Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foreco

Review

Exploring artificial intelligence for applications of drones in forest ecology

and management
Alexander Buchelt a,b , Alexander Adrowitzer b , Peter Kieseberg b , Christoph Gollob a ,
Arne Nothdurft a , Sebastian Eresheim b,c , Sebastian Tschiatschek c , Karl Stampfer a ,
Andreas Holzinger a,d,∗
a
Human-Centered AI Lab, Institute of Forest Engineering, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria
b
University of Applied Sciences St. Poelten, Austria
c
University of Vienna, Austria
d
XAI-Lab, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Edmonton, Canada

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This paper highlights the significance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the realm of drone applications in forestry.
Artificial intelligence Drones have revolutionized various forest operations, and their role in mapping, monitoring, and inventory
Machine learning procedures is explored comprehensively. Leveraging advanced imaging technologies and data processing
Drones
techniques, drones enable real-time tracking of changes in forested landscapes, facilitating effective monitoring
Unmanned aerial vehicles
of threats such as fire outbreaks and pest infestations. They expedite forest inventory by swiftly surveying
Forestry
Forest ecology large areas, providing precise data on tree species identification, size estimation, and health assessment, thus
supporting informed decision-making and sustainable forest management practices. Moreover, drones contribute
to tree planting, pruning, and harvesting, while monitoring reforestation efforts in real-time. Wildlife monitoring
is also enhanced, aiding in the identification of conservation concerns and informing targeted conservation
strategies. Drones offer a safer and more efficient alternative in search and rescue operations within dense
forests, reducing response time and improving outcomes. Additionally, drones equipped with thermal cameras
enable early detection of wildfires, enabling timely response, mitigation, and preservation efforts. The integration
of AI and drones holds immense potential for enhancing forestry practices and contributing to sustainable
land management. In the future explainable AI (XAI) improves trust and safety by providing transparency in
decision-making, aiding in liability issues, and enabling precise operations. XAI facilitates better environmental
monitoring and impact analysis, contributing to efficient forest management and preservation efforts. If a drone’s
AI can explain its actions, it will be easier to understand why it chose a particular path or action, which could
inform safety procedures and improvements.

1. Introduction and motivation for research
Forests are vital in today’s climate, especially in mitigating global
warming. Not only do forests bind CO2 , but they help with water
quality, can help regulate the temperature in urban areas, and also im-
portantly, they are the home to many wildlife species. Forestry efforts
are comprised of a plethora of tasks. Some of them concern themselves
especially with keeping forests healthy and making them realize their
full potential, but for that a lot of tasks are necessary. Currently, this
work is mostly done manually, which makes forest operations rather la-
borious, costly and hazardous. In this review, what these are and how
drones can be leveraged to alleviate these downsides, will be shown.
Forestry can be broadly categorized into forest monitoring, forest
inventory, forest management, wildlife monitoring as well as search
and rescue and wildfire monitoring. Forest monitoring and inventory
are rather closely related as this describes the branch that is concerned
with gathering and harmonizing data from Forests. For example tree
height, tree diameter, tree species, and also the number of trees of a
certain species and so on. These efforts are made to firstly keep an
overview of what state the forest is currently in but also to see how it
is developing and to inform forest management efforts. In forest man-

* Corresponding author at: Human-Centered AI Lab, Institute of Forest Engineering, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria.
E-mail address: andreas.holzinger@boku.ac.at (A. Holzinger).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2023.121530
Received 2 July 2023; Received in revised form 24 October 2023; Accepted 26 October 2023
Available online 9 November 2023
0378-1127/© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
agement, the concern is to act upon the monitoring data to ensure the
protection and maintenance of forested areas. This is done by pruning
diseased vegetation or reforestation to name a few. Wildlife monitor-
ing intuitively describes tasks to keep track of the wildlife that inhabits
forests. Search and Rescue as well as wildfire monitoring falls more in
a crisis management category as it is here where usually an accident
or a natural disaster has taken place and efforts are made to either lo-
cate people in need of assistance or keep damages to the forest at a
minimum. In recent years drones have become not only more accessi-
ble but also more capable and affordable. This opens the question of
how drones can aid forestry efforts like the practices described above.
Drones equipped with technology fit to take a variety of image data
on multiple spectra or other means of gathering data like LiDAR build
the basis for being integrated into forestry efforts. In combination with
constantly evolving machine learning and computer vision algorithms,
a host of advantages can be observed.
With evolving drone platforms, they are not only confined to obser-
vation but can also take part in more actionable tasks involved in forest
management. In the following section, this paper gives an overview of
how the current state-of-the-art leverages drones and their benefits to
further improve forestry conservation efforts as well as research in the
field. Current limitations and problems are discussed as well as where
future work could focus their efforts in order to mitigate and overcome
these limitations. Section 2 declares what the motivation behind this
review is. Section 3 gives an overview of what resources were used to
research publications in the field. In this section, a detailed explanation
is given, on what search terms were used and what criteria were used
to analyze publications. In section 5 we discuss the publications found
regarding what field the work was published in, as well as what was
accomplished with the methods used. Section 6 explains the machine
learning methods that are relevant to the work discussed. The review
is rounded off in section 7, by summarizing the findings, as well as the
commonalities between the included publications and an overview of
future directions that should be explored is given.
2. Objectives
The overall goal of this review is giving an overview of the existing
literature on the current usage of drones in forestry. Specifically, this
work attempts to (1) show what drone survey methods have been pub-
lished, (2) explain which AI techniques can be applied to each of these,
(3) identify future research directions. The specific goals were set in an
effort to serve a number of purposes. The first is to show parts of the
forestry community that may have not had a lot of contact with arti-
ficial intelligence or its application in conjunction with drones, why it
can be beneficial to think about incorporating them. The second is to
deliver an overview, to the part of the forestry community that already
incorporates artificial intelligence in their work, of what has been and
is currently being worked on as well as functioning as a starting point
to motivate possible future use cases. Lastly, having expertise in both
forestry as well as artificial intelligence this review attempts to act as
an overview for the artificial intelligence community, to show how their
expertise can be garnered to aid crucial forestry efforts, as it is our opin-
ion that interdisciplinary research will propel research.
3. Search methods and analysis
Before starting the search, the criteria publications had to fulfill to
be considered, as well as the criteria for inclusion in this review were
defined as follows.
General C r i t e r i a
Has t o have been p u b l i s h e d between 2008 and 2023
Has t o have been p u b l i s h e d i n an SCI l i s t e d
Journal −
or with a r e l e v a n t p u b l i s h e r ( e . g . MDPI)
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Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
Has t o f a l l i n t o a t l e a s t one o f the f i v e use
case categories
Criteria for inclusion
Uses A r t i f i c i a l I n t e l l i g e n c e
methods
Can be improved by A r t i f i c i a l I n t e l l i g e n c e
methods
Has t o be r e l e v a n t t o the o b j e c t i v e s o f t h i s
review
The work can be improved by the a p p l i c a t i o n o f
drones
Uses methods t h a t r e p r e s e n t the c u r r e n t s t a t e −
of −the −a r t
As the premise this review explores is rather broad, papers that were
to be included had to fulfill all of the general criteria. Concerning the
criteria for inclusion, papers that fulfilled one or more of these criteria
were added to the review.
As mentioned in the introduction this work explores five predefined
categories for use-cases of drones in the context of forestry. 1) Forest
Monitoring and Inventory; 2) Forest Management; 3) Wildlife Monitor-
ing; 4) Search and Rescue; and 5) Wildfire Monitoring.
Web of Sciences and Google Scholar tools were used to search for rel-
evant publications over the past 15 years, that fall into these disciplines.
The timeline was chosen to be fairly recent as artificial intelligence and
drone technology are constantly evolving, so in order to show the state-
of-the-art and possible use cases thereof have to be recent. The search
was also limited to publications that either use some form of artificial
intelligence as described in section 6 or that could benefit from imple-
menting more sophisticated methods. Keywords included but were not
limited to “drones in forestry”, “remote sensing” and “drones AND for-
est monitoring”. We discuss what methods the authors of the resulting
publications used, and what use cases were achieved as well as what
trends emerge and how they may be used to inform future research
efforts.
A Web of Sciences search using “drones in forestry” resulted in 243
publications for the period of 2008 to 2023. After refining the citation
topics meso to only include “Remote Sensing”, “Forestry”, “Zoology &
Animal Ecology” and “Computer Vision & Graphics” and the citation
topics micro to “Lidar”, “Forest Fires”, “Species Conservation”, “Deep
Learning”, “Deforestation” and “Forest Management”, the results were
narrowed to 99 publications.
Another Web of Sciences search using “drones AND forest monitor-
ing” resulted in 319 publications over the same period. After applying
the same refinement 125 were left. Using “drones AND forest invento-
ry” produced 65 publications after refinement. “drones AND wild fires”
and “drones AND search and rescue” resulted in 4 and 24 publications
respectively after refinement. In summary 317 publications were con-
sidered from the Web of Sciences.
The same Keywords were then used for a Google Scholar search to
supplement, especially areas such as Wildfire detection. The resulting
publications were then analyzed for their application and relevance to
the review, according to the previously defined criteria. After analyzing
the temporary corpora, 87 publications were included in section 5.
The main focus of section 6 is to give a clear surface-level expla-
nation of the included artificial intelligence methods, thus the origin
publications where these methods were first introduced were used, as
well as publications that highlight either current advancements of said
methods or their importance as in the case of explainability in Artifi-
cial Intelligence. In total, this resulted in 100 publications referenced
within this review.
4. Results
Table 1 depicts the methods used by the publications, spread across
the defined use-case categories. Note that though Convolutional Neural
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al. Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530

Fig. 1. Illustration of the search and analysis process to find the final publication corpus.

Table 1
Table showing the number of publications per use-case category, listed by the methods used.

Methods Forest Monitoring Forest Wildlife Search and Wildfire

and Inventory Management Monitoring Rescue Monitoring

Computer 27 2 4 3 7 43
Vision
Traditional ML 3 0 1 1 0 5
Methods
Deep learning 1 1 0 0 1 3
without CNN
No AI 12 4 3 1 1 21
43 7 8 5 9 72

Networks (CNNs) leverage Deep Learning principles and architectures,
for the purpose of this review however, they are included as Computer
Vision methods, as that is the context in which they are used. Deep
Learning (DL) methods in the context of Table 1 are therefore defined
as not including CNNs. Table 1 indicates that computer vision methods
are the most adopted field of AI when drones are applied in the for-
est domain. This makes intuitive sense as a lot of approaches explore
challenges related to some form of remote sensing in conjunction with
drones usually being fit with cameras at the time of purchase. There-
fore many of the tasks that are described by the publications in this
review try to detect something or estimate a variety of measurements
from images. It is also noteworthy that DL methods are rather under-
represented. In current times DL is too often applied to use cases that
do not need these complex methods but could also be handled by using
less sophisticated but more easily computable methods. However, the
results shown in Table 1, indicate that the potential benefits of applying
DL should be explored, see also Fig. 1.
Fig. 2 shows the number of publications in the field of drones in
forestry per year that do apply at least some sort AI. It clearly shows
a surge from 2018 to 2020 with a sudden decrease in the last two
years again. Fig. 3 further splits this data into different application ar-
eas within forestry and shows that most of the research was done in the
field of forest monitoring and inventory. However, there seems to be a
recent interest in wildfire monitoring, whereas there has not been new
research in the fields of search & rescue and wildlife monitoring using
AI powered drones since 2017. Fig. 4 depicts the publications grouped
by AI methods that were paired with drones in the forest domain. While
there seems to be a rather constant trend using drones without any AI,
AI methods have been increasingly applied since 2019, see Fig. 5.

3
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
Fig. 2. Amount of papers across all use cases that apply AI methods with drones
in the forest domain.
5. Discussion
Having motivated why it is important to look into ways of aiding
forestry operations, this section gives a more in-depth overview of what
work is currently done, what advantages can be observed as a result,
and what limitations still remain to be overcome. This is done in an
effort to animate current research to take action in directions that can
leverage drones to their full potential while further developing how
forests are taken care of, to reach solutions that help them realize their
full potential.
5.1. Forest monitoring and inventory
Monitoring is a very prevalent topic for drone usage in natural sci-
ence in general. Zhang et al. (2016) showed in their work how micro
drones with predetermined flight paths can be used as a cost-effective
monitoring method for a variety of ecological measures like canopy
height, canopy closure and species richness, just to name a few. The
authors showed the usefulness of drones for this type of use case on
a 20-ha part of a nature reserve in China. The work mentions that by
leveraging ground sensors and other already in-use methods with aerial
drone imagery of the canopy, drones can contribute majorly to under-
standing the biodiversity of a given forest plot.
The importance of monitoring in forestry is further supported by
Mayr et al. (2018) who have found that disturbance, most commonly
by wildlife grazing and fires, has an impact on general tree growth.
The authors showed this by evaluating and validating tree height data
derived from drone images for the example of the Namibian savannah.
Another approach that uses a GPS-powered autonomous flight suite
is shown by Kellner et al. (2019). The work highlights how low-altitude
drones equipped with LiDAR technology can be used to monitor and
scan forests. The authors show that this method is capable of achieving
similar results to earthbound lidar scans while being able to cover more
ground effectively and reducing cost. It is mentioned that a prevalent
use case for this is the scanning of individual trees, as the point cloud
scan can be used to calculate above-ground biomass. Similarly, Kuželka
et al. (2020) showed that they were able to accurately detect two differ-
ent tree species using a multitude of methods. Kuželka et al. also used
high-density point cloud data taken from sub-canopy drone-mounted
LiDAR scanners. Hyyppä et al. (2020) show that a similar LiDAR-based
approach works for detecting trees and even stem curves. Again by us-
ing data that was collected from a LiDAR sensor deployed on a manually
flown drone at under-canopy height in a boreal forest. Additionally
Fletcher and Mather (2020) show how solar elevation, among others,
impacts the quality and reproducibility of these point cloud data.
Balsi et al. (2018) note however that a sizeable amount of work
currently done on the topic of forest monitoring has shortcomings in
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Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
performance, caused by the approaches relying on the search of lo-
cal maxima. The authors, therefore, propose an approach that uses
LiDAR-based 3D-shape modeling to mitigate these problems. They show
promising results on an example of a Hazel farm.
To maximize the cost reduction aspect of drones for monitor-
ing purposes, efficient image gathering is an important consideration.
Wierzbicki (2018) showed an approach that uses a multi-camera setup
that increases the field of view that is being recorded. The images of all
cameras at a given point are then merged by mosaic, therefore reduc-
ing the number of images that need to be processed while maintaining
better coverage with a single pass.
Forest monitoring plays an important role in enhancing forest con-
servation efforts, by providing vital data. Santos et al. (2019) outlined
that current deep-learning-based CV object detection lends itself to aid
in these efforts. The authors were able to classify specimens of an endan-
gered tree species in Brazil to a promising degree of average precision
of 92% while maintaining a processing time of around 32 milliseconds.
Among others, monitoring leaf phenology is an important task, as in
fall it indicates the end of leaf growing season, impacting tree crowns
and therefore photosynthetic seasonality and others. Wu et al. (2021)
point out that if tried only with satellite imagery, this is a non-trivial
task because of the lack of spacial resolution leading to difficulty identi-
fying individual tree crowns as well as temporal availability of the data.
The authors, therefore, propose a method that integrates PlanetScope,
a constellation of satellites with high spatial resolution and near-daily
refresh rates, with drone observations. They show that by enhancing
PlanetScope data with near-ground drone imagery in which individual
crowns are detectable, the authors were able to predict accurately what
part of their phenology a tree is in when compared to current state-of-
the-art phenocams. Similar work has been done by Park et al. (2019)
showing that RGB imagery taken by drones produces promising results
in predicting phenological development, with their algorithm predict-
ing individual trees with an R2 of 0.82 and a mean absolute error (MAE)
of 8.1% and species with an R2 of 0.89 and an MAE of 6.0%.
Tang and Shao (2015) identify the time-critical availability and
stand-level data as the two key problems for already established re-
mote sensing and monitoring methods such as satellite and airplane
imagery which can be alleviated by drones as they are not affected by
cloud coverage and are able to deliver fast real-time video and image
streams, as well as being more cost-effective in both purchase and op-
erating expenses. The authors note that drones can carry a variety of
sensing equipment like visible light, near-infrared (NIR), shortwave in-
frared (SWIR), thermal infrared (TIR), Radar, and LiDAR. They propose
four specific applications, for drones within the field of monitoring,
with reference to various researchers’ work. Forest surveying can give
great benefits in monitoring human activities, wildlife activities, and
identifying flora (Koh and Wich, 2012; Paneque-Gálvez et al., 2014).
Mapping canopy gaps is an important application because it can show
disturbances and affects forest diversity and productivity (Frolking et
al., 2009; Getzin et al., 2012). Monitoring forest canopy height is a
critical indicator in forest quantification, Tang et al. use various experi-
ments (Siebert and Teizer, 2014; Lisein et al., 2013; Zarco-Tejada et al.,
2014; Dandois and Ellis, 2013) to reinforce the claim, that drones are an
alternative to more costly and complex LiDAR systems while not com-
promising on performance. Drones can also be used to track wildfires.
In this case, drones can give real-time data on a wildfire’s status and, in
doing so, can inform a strategy to fight wildfires while minimizing the
risk to humans (Wing et al., 2013).
A very important topic when it comes to forest monitoring is the de-
tection, prevention, and treatment of tree illnesses. The reason for this
importance lies in nature conservation, if illnesses are not detected early
on they can have broader impacts on a forest which leads to the neces-
sity of rather costly nature conservation measures. Kocer et al. (2021)
describe this premise to further detail in their work. They also describe
that, in broad terms, drones can help in this effort by placing sensors on
trees either by means of launching them or placing them more carefully.
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
Fig. 3. Amount of papers grouped by forest use cases that apply AI methods with drones.
Another way is for drones to act as sensors themselves either through
visual physical means i.e. video and image or by perching themselves
on trees. Drones might also come into play for collecting leaf samples
to aid in the diagnosis and detection of certain diseases. A very interest-
ing use-case that Kocer et al. describe is an object detection pipeline in
which the drone scans leaves and is able to detect on its own if a tree is
likely to be healthy or bares signs of bacteria. A similar approach would
be to use drones to detect crown loss as an indicator of tree and forest
health. As with other describe use cases, the benefit of using drones in
the ways described by Kocer et al. lies in its rather good cost efficiency
but also primarily in reducing the risk for human operators as current
methods do pose non trivial risks.
As the research shows, drones are currently deployed above the
canopies using photogrammetric or LiDAR technology to take measure-
ments in the majority of current work. While the choice of technology
seems to make little difference (Ganz et al., 2019; Moe et al., 2020),
even though LiDAR can have challenges in certain cases (Hastings et
al., 2020), the need for estimating or interpolating the ground beneath
the forest canopy (Graham et al., 2019, 2020) still remains. Theoret-
ically, these problems could be mitigated by deploying drones below
the canopy line and therefore gathering more accurate measurements
of the same. This assumption appears to be supported by Krisanski et
al. (2020), who make similar claims.
The field of forest inventory is closely interlinked with monitoring a
forest as it concerns itself with acquiring auxiliary forest metrics. This
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Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
can be, among others, forest height, canopy density, tree species diver-
sity, and biomass. Drones can play a vital role in taking and monitoring
forest inventory as they can be utilized to gather imagery without the
need to use human resources to accomplish the same. In their work
Kotivuori et al. (2020) show that so-called drone image point clouds
(DIPC) can be used the same way as existing methods like airborne
laser scanning (ALS). They furthermore show that DIPC can be regarded
as a good alternative to ALS in some regards like estimating measure-
ments and metrics for the top layers of forests. Kotivuori et al. conclude
that DIPC can be used in conjunction with ALS for existing models to
enhance the accuracy of estimations in both top-level as well as the
lower-level forest metrics. A further advantage DIPC has over ALS that
the authors mention is that ALS usually takes a lot of time between up-
dates of the inventory, here drones can be leveraged to shorten these
intervals giving a more timely overview of current forest inventory.
In the vein of having forest inventory for tree species diversity pur-
poses, Nezami et al. (2020) show that by using RGB and hyperspectral
drone imagery, they were able to classify tree species. In their exper-
iments, they compare different data and architectures but conclude
that a combination of RGB and hyperspectral camera data collected
by drones perform best. The authors showed this for a classification of
three different tree types found in the forests of Finland. This is fur-
ther supported by Schiefer et al. (2020) who were able to classify trees
by deploying semantic segmentation approaches like U-net on high-
resolution RGB imagery taken by UAVs as well as Picos et al. (2020)
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
Fig. 4. Amount of papers grouped by AI methods.
Fig. 5. Venn-Diagram of the included papers on whether they use drones and AI
in the field within the application domain forest. Note that AI methods without
the use of drones is out of scope of this paper.
who were able to classify individual Eucalyptus trees by using LiDAR
and performing a buffer based and kernel density based estimation ap-
proach on the resulting point cloud data. Yu et al. (2020) note that
hyperspectral images taken by drones are prone to errors by being
susceptible to wind, GPS errors, and the like, and therefore show an
approach that intends to minimize these errors by applying a novel im-
age registration method.
Wang et al. (2019) classified and enumerated individual oil palm
trees. What makes this work interesting however is the use of more tra-
ditional machine learning methods like SVM and histogram of oriented
gradient (HOG) to achieve their approach. Foregoing the use of deep
learning bares the potential of reducing inference time and computa-
tional intensity and duration of the training phase.
Analyzing tree canopies is an important task, as Lou et al. (2022)
describe tree canopies to give a good measure for the estimation of
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Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
biomass, growth, and wood properties. This can be traced to the canopy
consisting of the chloroform-filled foliage of a tree which directly con-
tributes to these factors. Lou et al. mention that current analyses lack
distinctly in one part which is the measurement of tree width, con-
ventional methods that are widely in use are rather laborious and can
differ significantly in accuracy as they are influenced by factors like
ground coverage, location, surrounding height levels, etc. In their work,
they also mention that current methods to estimate tree width among
other metrics, use LiDAR and multispectral remote sensing which can be
rather cost-intensive, have trouble with individual trees, and is some-
what limited to areas without multiple canopy layers as for these ac-
curacies vary. Lou et al. showed, on the example of loblolly pine in
Texas USA, that drone images when used in conjunction with object
detection can increase the accuracy of the estimation or measurement
of the previously mentioned forest inventory metrics. Since Lou et al.
only used high-altitude drone images, and small drones can be used
for low-altitude imagery close to ground level, we theorize by utilizing
this capability further improvements can be made. Along similar lines
Jevšenak et al. (2023) showed that satellite imagery is well-suited to
enhance tree growth estimations. The authors note that there is a dis-
parity for species-specific metrics on satellite images, which poses the
question if these problems could be circumvented by using drone im-
agery on a near-ground level.
Another work that studied tree canopies was published by Petersen
et al. (2023) where airborne laser scans were used to monitor changes
in tree canopy development. More specifically the authors found that
moose have a negative impact on canopy height and above-ground
biomass. The experiments were conducted over 100 paired exclosure-
control plots distributed across boreal biomes. The work clearly shows
that moose have a drastic impact on the development of a forest. Con-
sidering the importance that boreal forests have in global carbon cy-
cling, the work done by Petersen et al. underlines the necessity of this
field of research and how drones can aid in these efforts.
Tree canopies are also being studied from the standpoint of gap dy-
namics. Hagemann et al. (2022) conducted a pilot study on airborne
laser scanning data taken from northern Sweden in 2006 and 2016.
The authors Boolean model for reference to assess the statistical signif-
icance of canopy gap dynamics for being an indicator of damage and
irreversible trends in forests. Hagemann et al. showed that data col-
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
lected from drones even in moderate resolutions are a viable tool for
monitoring canopy gap dynamics.
Along tree canopies, measuring tree growth is an important indica-
tor, informing forest management. Dempewolf et al. (2017) note that
usually measurements are taken annually or even per decade, for this
reason the authors showed that drone imagery lends itself to increase
the frequency of this data to within-season measurements. They were
able to measure tree growth with an accuracy that agrees with pub-
lished field observations for Norway spruce, Scots pine, Silver birch, and
European beech while taking advantage of cost reductions that come
with drones. Similarly, Krause et al. (2018) showed that photogram-
metric tree height measurements taken by drones are a viable option for
forest monitoring and inventory, by comparing their results to manually
made in-field measurements. Interestingly the authors also noticed that
in-situ measurements tend to be overestimated and photogrammetric
UAV measurements are commonly underestimated. Another interesting
point is raised by Huang et al. (2019), wherein the authors found out
that the absence of leaves during fall seasons leads to an underestima-
tion of tree height measured from UAV images.
Taking inventory of forests has a multitude of important uses, one
of which is the estimation of biomass. This can for example be used
to estimate the amount of carbon stored by trees. Jones et al. (2022)
sought to explore the possibility to do this using drone imagery. The au-
thors did this in a small subplot of mangroves in southern Australia. The
specific mangrove was an Avicennia marina. Currently, measurements
needed to estimate biomass are usually measured in situ by measuring
tree height, canopy area, and tree diameter at breast height. With these
measures being taken in-situ this brings with it a non-trivial amount of
needed resources and hazards, for mangroves, these are for example dis-
eases carried by mosquitoes and predatory wildlife, of course depending
on the geographic location, though the examples are specific to man-
groves in the area covered by the mentioned article, the main points
of resource intensity and hazards do translate to other geographic lo-
cations and types of forests. Jones et al. mention that at the moment
if these measures cannot be taken, a default value is used. It is agreed
upon, that these default values lack both in accuracy and adequacy. The
authors used images from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in order
to map a point cloud as well as make a georectified orthomaosaic with
manually digitized canopies to compute the canopy area in m2 . Jones et
al. showed that for the tree height, the estimations taken from UAV im-
agery was very accurate and close to reality. When trying to predict the
biomass the authors encounter a few troubles. The authors used their es-
timated measures of tree height, canopy area, and diameter with current
field standard allometric estimations to determine biomass. They found
that these methods are heavily reliant on tree diameter, which is the
measure that they were least successful in gathering from their method
of UAV image gathering. Jones et al. boil this down to mangroves very
often having multi-trunked vegetation structures which leads to miscal-
culating the diameter based on height and canopy area. They conclude
however, that if the estimation of biomass were to be steered and devel-
oped in a more hybrid measure direction, relying less on diameter and
more on all measures available, the large advantages of drone-based
forest inventory, like very fast, large and resource-conserving inven-
tory coverage and the elimination or at least reduction of hazards to
humans, could be realized in a major way. Di Gennaro et al. (2020)
concerned themselves with the estimation of biomass reduction after
pruning. They showed that UAV-gathered multispectral imagery lead
to a viable estimation of biomass reduction in a chestnut orchard in
Italy. Di Gennaro et al. also mention this to feed into a more sustain-
able economy as this can be used to estimate the by-product of pruning
namely wood material that can be used by production within a supply
chain. Jones et al. and Di Gennaro et al. show a rather promising proof
of concept, given future developments. We hypothesize, however, that
if the flight height of 40 m that the authors used were to be reduced
to a more near-ground altitude the diameter estimation based on the
UAV point cloud could drastically be improved. This in turn could lead
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Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
to better biomass prediction in the here discussed experiments, without
the necessary need for major developments.
A similar approach was shown by Sumnall et al. (2023). The au-
thors used existing experiments in Pinus taeda L. plantations containing
a variety of planting types and densities. The work shows that UAV
laser scanning data lends itself to achieving quite accurate predictions
regarding individual tree crowns as well as estimations concerning the
diameter at breast height. This was demonstrated by using a backward-
stepwise linear multiple regression and a random forest model, both
achieving competitive results. A random forest model does preserve the
extra bonus of allowing for easier explainability.
In their work, Aasen et al. (2015) show an approach that uses hy-
perspectral snapshot cameras to create images of vegetation. They show
that the data gathered from a lightweight UAV is sufficient to create a
model that is very close to in-field measurements in terms of biomass,
plant height, and chlorophyll. The authors showed this for the example
of a barley field, we hypothesize however that this could be leveraged
to keep an inventory of a forest as well.
Another reason why forest inventory is taken is to find and monitor
diseases that affect trees and to take countermeasures, this is usually
done by removing affected trees. It is also important to keep track of
how a forest develops with the disease i.e. the spread or how much
of the inventory had to be removed and so on. Currently to accom-
plish this, rather expensive satellite images and field measurements are
needed, drones represent a way of gathering the required data in a more
affordable and resource-saving way. Yu et al. (2021) showed this on
the example of pine wilt disease (PWD) on a small subplot of forest in
eastern China. They used multi- and hyper-spectral imagery gathered
from a UAV at a considerable altitude. These images were prepared and
fed through mainly two current and regularly used machine learning
(ML) algorithms, a Random Forest classifier and a support vector ma-
chine (SVM). The authors showed that it is possible to classify PWD
using their gathered aerial data in conjunction with commonly used ML
methods. They showed this regardless of the stage the disease is in. Oide
et al. (2022) took this approach a step further by proving that visible
color imagery (i.e. RGB Video) is enough to provide data for accurate
PWD detection while being obtained in a rather low-cost fashion. They
proved this for a small forest area in Japan. They showed that RGB im-
agery can be used by a variety of ML methods to accurately predict PWD
infection. This notion is further backed by Xia et al. (2021) who were
able to detect PWD by using deep learning segmentation methods on
images taken from a fixed-wing drone. The authors do however note,
that their work as well as previous work in the same field has prob-
lems when the disease is sparsely spread in a rather small area or when
it comes to classifying individual trees. Again it is shown that UAVs
present a way of achieving or enhancing critical tasks while being able
to reduce cost and labor, also our previously mentioned hypothesis of
near-ground drone imagery being the missing link in order to enhance
current methods as well as solving some of the problems, researchers
are currently facing, again arises.
Wang et al. (2021) showed how drones can be leveraged to perform
forest inventory through LiDAR measurements. In their work, they car-
ried out a drone mission in which they were able to scan approximately
0.5 ha of forest in around 10 minutes of flight. What makes the work
very interesting is that they combined both above- and under-canopy
flight in order to measure every aspect of the forest and generate a
complete picture from their measurements. Their results showed that
this approach represents an excellent basis on which to build auton-
omy as their measurements for stem diameter and height were rather
accurate achieving a minimal margin of error.
A similar problem was tackled by Zhang et al. (2022) who performed
various ultra-low flying scans of different forest plots of differing sizes
in Japan. The authors created understory measurements to generate
models that were able to predict understory biomass, tree stem volume,
and height. They showed by measuring the understory directly with
drones these predictors yielded acceptable results while being able to
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
save on resources, thus showing the value of being able to deploy drones
as measuring tools not only to monitor forests above the canopy but
rather how vital the advancements can be by deploying drones in the
understory to have an accurate picture of the vegetation. Further, we
hypothesize that the advantages implied by this work can be expanded
by setting a focus on deploying drones autonomously.
5.2. Forest management
Forest Management in broader terms, concerns itself with every-
thing that is needed to maintain a forest. This includes tasks like refor-
estation, pruning, taking care of, and containing the spread of diseases.
This field is increasing in importance as forests become more and more
endangered by global warming and society’s greed for industrially used
areas to which more often than not forests are destroyed. Maintaining
and growing forests, ensuring their health, and species variety gain im-
portance. Drones can play a vital role in aiding this cause, especially
in treacherous or unreachable terrain. To this end, data and its subse-
quent transportation is needed, in order to make decisions about which
actions need to be taken when for example. Farinha et al. (2020) show
that Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be used for this. In their
work, they propose a novel a new form of placing such a WSN using
drones as well as how sensors should be structured and protected while
saving resources as no interaction is needed to build the WSN while be-
ing deployable in terrain that is unreachable to humans or would carry
a lot of risk to be reached. We believe that this work can be a crucial
basis on which to build further UAV use cases, especially with auton-
omy.
Another important task in the field of forest management is the
planting of seeds. This can be done in an effort of previously men-
tioned reforestation or to bind carbon by increasing vegetation which
also leads to increasing the nutrient levels within the soil. Fortes (2017)
shows a proof of concept on how drones can be utilized to aid these ef-
forts. In their work, they show that they were able to fit a drone with
a global positioning system (GPS) to navigate the drone via an autopi-
lot on preplanned missions, a seed dispenser and a seed controller that
controlled when to release the seeds from the dispenser. Though the re-
sults of Fortes’s work were not entirely successful the work does show a
viable approach that can be modified and built upon to garner greater
results as well as the feasibility of such drone-based solutions as a cost
and resource-effective alternative to manual labor in these efforts.
A different but very promising proof of concept is provided by
Dampage et al. (2020). In their work the authors show a sewing mech-
anism that can be fitted to a quadcopter drone that is able to control
shutter speed and takes time delay and sewing angle into account in
order to generate an optimal sewing interval and size. The drone is fit-
ted with GPS and in order to make it able to carry out sewing missions
autonomously, a mission planning software was used. In the proposed
approach the drone is aware of its home base and the farmer has to
mark the boundaries of the field that is to be cultivated by the drone.
By marking the boundaries the drone can then take care of the sewing
in an optimal fashion, should a critical situation, like low battery levels
arise, the drone will automatically return to its home base to prevent
unrecoverable failure. Dampage et al. showed this to work sewing rice
in a paddy field. We however venture to propose the hypothesis that
this seed dispensing technique could be elaborated upon in terms of
mission planning by using AI methods. Furthermore, we think that the
dispensing system could be used for a variety of seeds and applications.
Siedler (2022) shows a very novel and interesting approach. They in-
terpreted the reforestation task as a multi-agent reinforcement learning
(RL) problem rather than most works that explore single drone solu-
tions. In their work, they use an environment created in unity that is
procedurally generated. It includes information like height, ground fer-
tility displayed by green grass, and land features like trees and ponds.
Also included is a drone station that acts as a spawn point, recharge sta-
tion, and seed silo. In this environment the task for the agents consists
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Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
of picking up seeds from the drone station, if none are carried at that
moment, scouting an optimal location for reforestation, and dropping
their seeds. The agents learn this while keeping track of their battery
level which is crucial in order to prevent battery-related unrecoverable
failure. The agents learn not only to keep track of their battery charge
but also to act accordingly i.e. keeping in mind that the power level
has to be enough to return to the recharge station and noticing the
need to recharge and doing so upon their next visit to the drone sta-
tion. The agents for Siedler’s work are set up in a way where drones
that are within 200 m of each other can be understood as a graph, uti-
lizing a GNN communication layer the agents can, within said distance,
exchange messages. This fosters collaboration, which leads to more
exploration i.e. more ground discovered and covered. Siedler showed
that agents that were trained on a multitude of environments outper-
form those who were trained on a single environment. The work also
shows that having the ability to communicate not only leads to more
exploration but also outperforms agents that were not able to send and
receive messages in general. It has to be said that the environment is
rather abstracted, which is to mean not necessarily close to reality in
terms of physics and drone control, which very obviously still brings
the simulation to reality gap into play. Siedler however mentions these
to be the fields that the work can be improved upon in future work.
Even though the experiments show a simulated not necessarily close to
reality, approach, it has to be noted that this still is a very interesting
direction to take this task in and should in our opinion be explored fur-
ther as methods of agent training and environment interpretation could
be utilized in a variety of tasks not only for reforestation.
The critical task of reforestation also needs a means to monitor their
success. Goodbody et al. (2018) show how drones can be used as a
cost-effective alternative to current yearly measurements of growth. To
achieve this, drones were deployed equipped with RGB cameras. The re-
sulting images were converted to digital aerial photogrammetric (DAP)
point clouds on which a number of indices were computed to estimate
the forest’s status of regeneration.
The before mentioned task of pruning trees in a forest mainly con-
sists of cutting parts like branches off trees or other plants. This is done
for a variety of reasons. It can be used in the early stages of growth in
order to ensure good stem quality or in the example of eucalyptus to
maximize harvest. It can also be necessary to reduce canopy density to
ensure enough penetration of sunlight. In order to know which branches
to prune when careful considerations, which are usually driven by data
gathered in the field, have to be made. Wallace et al. (2014) propose a
method to leverage ASL data gathered by small UAV in order to estimate
the need for pruning. They show on the example of Tasmanian eucalyp-
tus that it is feasible to use UAV in order to generate data that has
good enough quality to result in rather accurate predictions that lead to
the right pruning decisions. Their work showed that a lot of human re-
sources can be saved and risks can be averted by using these methods,
without losing performance. Ishigure et al. (2013) proposed a proof of
concept for a tree-mounted robot fitted with a low-power chainsaw that
is capable of climbing a tree and pruning branches. We hypothesize that
with current advances in technological equipment, it could be possible
to fit a drone in order to be capable of achieving these same tasks, even
if this is not the case, with the mentioned advances it should be possi-
ble to fit a ground robot with the equipment to autonomously find trees
and branches that have been marked for pruning and carrying out this
task. In our opinion, these two works show a substantial basis on which
autonomous forest management can be built. A point has to be made
that these two approaches if reworked to use near-ground drone images
and autonomous pruning robots, whether this is a drone or another type
of robot, form a very crucial use case for drones and autonomy in forest
management, as this would lower human resources, hazards to humans,
and general cost significantly.
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
5.3. Wildlife monitoring
Wildlife plays a vital role in a forest’s ecology. To ensure an ecosys-
tem’s health this needs to be managed carefully. Keeping track of
Wildlife and monitoring is a crucial part of this, in order to make well-
informed management decisions and take optimal measures.
Using drones to keep track of animal population is gaining in use
recently, but the validity of these methods was questioned in the begin-
ning. Hodgson et al. (2018) sought to clarify this in their work. They
used drone imagery taken from various heights in order to prove that
drones are not only more cost-effective but can also produce better re-
sults. In the example of the seabird population, the authors showed
that counts taken from drone imagery are on average significantly more
accurate when compared to more traditional methods. Hodgson et al.
were able to prove this for manual counts as well as semi- and fully-
automated statistical counting methods where computer vision was
used to count birds on the gathered images.
Lyons et al. (2019) show an approach that uses drone imagery taken
from higher altitudes to count nesting bird populations. In their work,
the authors compare manual and automated machine learning-based
counting methods. They show that drone imagery in conjunction can be
leveraged to gain similar results as existing counting methods while re-
ducing labor costs as well as being able to cover more ground in shorter
time spans. Lyons et al. also mention that with this approach it is possi-
ble to monitor wildlife in places that are hard or impossible to reach or
traverse for humans, making drones an excellent cost-efficient alterna-
tive.
An approach based on the agricultural sector is given by Xu et al.
(2020). In their work, the authors show a computer vision-based deep
learning approach that is able to classify livestock in near real-time
on minimal computing power. The authors show promising results not
only in the classification of livestock but also in counting. Xu et al.
mention this to be a labor-effective alternative to manual counting, es-
pecially in remote and rugged terrain that is hard to reach for humans.
Even though the work shows the validity of this approach with an agri-
cultural example, we hypothesize that the masking algorithms in use
should be applicable to a forest setting as well.
Different to computer vision-based approaches, Aulia Rahman and
Setiawan (2020) explored a thermal image-based approach. In their
work, they tested this on various canopy densities in the rainforests
of Indonesia. The authors found that at an altitude of <50 m the re-
sults were best and animals were best visible on the images, this also
kept noise pollution to a seemingly tolerable level. Not surprising how-
ever their results were very dependent on the time of day as when the
sun heated the canopy, thermal images of animals started being inter-
fered with. The authors concluded that their work builds a good basis
for remote wildlife monitoring, especially in areas that are not easy or
impossible for humans to reach. The best results were achieved during
the early morning or evening, we hypothesize however when used in a
less warm climate, the time of day concern may vary.
An important consideration when pairing wildlife with drones is
noise pollution. The aim should be monitoring without interfering.
Scobie and Hugenholtz (2016) conducted experiments concerning this
topic. They show that interference depends on altitude, species and
frequencies. While not giving specific thresholds, their work is an im-
portant basis that shows that these considerations are important to be
made. Another option to reduce noise levels significantly in certain ap-
plications is the use of blimps, airships without a rigid inner structure.
Studies have been conducted already 10 years ago on how this technol-
ogy can drastically reduce noise pollution (Liew and Yairi, 2013). The
rise in multi-rotor drone technology and the inherent poor performance
under windy conditions and the complexities in overcoming this limita-
tion (Furukawa and Shimada, 2014) moved blimps out of the scope for
most applications.
Thapa et al. (2018) compared wildlife counts conducted on aerial
imagery taken by a fixed wing drone with on-site manual visual en-
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Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
counter inventory of an endangered species of crocodiles. While not
necessarily using a novel computer vision approach they were able to
show, that remote counts taken via UAV render the same results on av-
erage while being able to cover significantly more ground in less time.
The authors’ approach, therefore, proves that drones are a great alter-
native to manual methods for counting wildlife as they can be more
resource- and time effective when used correctly, without having to ac-
cept the loss in performance.
5.4. Search and rescue
Forests do not only hold wildlife but also humans in the form of
hikers, and forestry workers just to name examples. Unfortunately like
anywhere, accidents happen here as well. Search and rescue, therefore,
is a very important task that usually is very time critical. If a person
needs to be found often times large search parties roam the forest in
and around the last known location. Below we explore how drones can
be applied to aid in these tasks.
Schedl et al. (2021) used a drone equipped with intelligent path
planning to fly autonomously (Chen et al., 2020; Radmanesh et al.,
2018; Mengying et al., 2017) as the basis for their work. In their ex-
periments, they fitted the drone with thermal imaging hardware and
segmented the search area into a grid. Each sector got assigned a like-
lihood of finding the missing person. The novelty in the author’s work
comes from implementing a dynamic search pattern where the drone
decides itself which grids to search, and in what order based on finding
probabilities. This approach showed acceptable results and therefore
builds a great basis on which future advancements in the field can be
made.
Yong and Yeong (2018) implement an object detection algorithm ca-
pable of detecting humans in forest environments. Their approach uses
computer vision enabled by deep learning. The authors show reason-
ably good results, by being able to detect humans without deterrence
by trees and other noise in the images. Yong and Yeong note that their
work can be extended by implementing autonomous drone flight, as in
their work the drone is controlled remotely. Even though the goal of
the work is to implement object detection for surveillance, detecting
trespassing and illegal activity, we hypothesize that it can also build
the foundation in the field of search and rescue. Good human detection
builds a crucial component for carrying out search and rescue missions.
Currently, drones are not necessarily used to find missing persons,
during search and rescue operations, by themselves. They are also lever-
aged as a tool to gather information quickly over large surface areas.
The captured images are then scanned manually by search parties to
find signs of the missing persons to inform searchers where to look.
This is done in an effort to speed up the search, as time is a cru-
cial component for success. Scanning this material manually can be
very times consuming. That is why Weldon and Hupy (2020) explored
how computer-assisted interpretation compares to the current manual
method. In their work, they found mixed results. While humans were
able to find signs of missing persons more accurately, machine-assisted
methods are able to go through more material in a fraction of the
time. The work shows good potential for machine assistance, and ef-
forts should be made to evolve these methods even further to a point
where they can also detect humans more accurately, therefore reducing
the time it takes to find missing persons greatly.
Another search and rescue scenarios are natural disasters. Mishra
et al. (2020) show that current computer vision models are not ade-
quate for finding signs of life after a natural crisis. Therefore the authors
propose their own object detection algorithm based on state-of-the-art
data sets that shows better results for finding humans on imagery cap-
tured by autonomous drones. Advancements like these show two things.
Firstly they are not solely applicable to natural disasters but to all ar-
eas of search and rescue missions as well as any other scenario where
human detection is needed. Secondly, they show the importance of fur-
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
ther work in the field, marking the importance of exploring how society
can benefit from interaction with intelligent systems.
A less artificial intelligence-heavy approach is shown by Valsan et
al. (2020). In their work they fitted a drone with various sensors, the
most important of which being a Passive Infra-Red (PIR) sensor. The
drone is flown over sites of natural disasters via GPS and Obstacle sen-
sors. If the PIR sensor detects human movement a signal is sent to an
Arduino controller, that activates a buzzer or an LED indicating that
help is needed. As well as finding persons in need, the drone is also de-
ployed to monitor rescue efforts to aid a secure and speedy recovery
of people who need medical attention or are in dangerous situations.
The authors mention that the focus of their work was to find a solution
that is very cost-effective and easy to deploy in areas that are prone to
natural disasters.
5.5. Wildfire detection and intervention
With the current state of global warming and the, therefore, chang-
ing climates, wildfires proportionally gain traction as an area of con-
cern. With higher frequency of occurrence and more devastating conse-
quences and magnitudes of disaster, naturally, a lot of research efforts
are taken to mitigate forest fires. Particularly work is done in the field
of detecting, monitoring, containment and prevention.
In order to achieve wildfire prevention a lot of data to train mod-
els on is needed. Viseras et al. (2019) present a dataset containing data
from controlled burns. The images were collected from drones at vary-
ing heights and with both optical and thermal cameras. The authors
show that on the thermal cameras hotspots as small as 15 cm are visi-
ble. By making this data publicly available this work can be used to aid
researchers in their efforts to develop deep learning-based methods.
Kinaneva et al. (2019) conceptualize an approach that is concerned
with the early detection of wildfires, as doing so could be crucial in
deploying measures to keep the fire from ever spreading and causing
havoc. The authors propose achieving this by deploying fixed-wing and
multi-copter drones at varying heights. These drones are to be equipped
with onboard computing capabilities to deploy computer vision technol-
ogy. The images that are taken by the mounted cameras and thermal
imagery equipment are used to detect smoke plumage, amber, and fire.
These UAVs are proposed to forest areas to raise awareness in case a
fire is imminent.
Another interesting way to facilitate monitoring via drones is pro-
posed by Afghah et al. (2019). In their work, they propose the concept
of deploying drones in a distributed coalition format. A number of
drones are clustered to a coalition having one UAV as the coalition
leader that monitors and directs observer drones equipped with dif-
ferent monitoring equipment over areas of interest. In doing so the
authors hope to leverage drone capabilities to achieve more area cov-
erage and on-demand monitoring, which is hardly achievable through
current satellite-based solutions. In essence, the authors also hope to
minimize human intervention specifically in remote areas, therefore,
reducing the risk to humans by being exposed to unmonitored wildfires
and hazardous areas that are hard to reach.
An issue that arises in wildfire detection as well as any other field
in computer vision is the availability and quality of training data. To
mitigate these problems, transfer learning can be applied, which is also
the approach that Treneska and Risteska Stojkoska (2021) propose in
their paper. The authors show that by utilizing transfer learning they
were able to train various CV architectures on a fire dataset achieving
good results, particularly for ResNet50. The authors propose this work
be deployed on UAVs. A similar approach with a similar goal in mind is
shown by Gupta et al. (2022). Instead of transfer learning the authors
trained a CNN to be able to accurately identify a fire in a forest con-
text. In order to mitigate overfitting, the CNN was trained on a variety
of images of fire-like nature ranging in various aspects like day- and
nighttime while producing promising results.
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Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
Rashid et al. (2020) present a novel and very interesting approach,
that they have coined CompDrone. In this approach, the authors use a
combination of social-media-driven drone sensing (SDS) and computa-
tional wildfire modeling to predict wildfire propagation. The framework
shown in this work uses social media posts to initially alert on the ex-
istence of a forest fire and dispatches drones to this location to get a
verified and more informed view of the situation. The framework then
uses the information gathered by the drones to inform the wildfire prop-
agation model to predict how the fire is going to evolve so that actions
that contain it can be taken. Contrastly Merino et al. (2012) showed
a more intuitive approach wherein a number of drones is deployed to
gain as much data about the fire, through infrared and normal RGB
cameras. The data is then communicated to a central station that makes
a prediction of the fire’s development.
Another novel approach to detecting forest fires is proposed by Ghali
et al. (2022), who have used existing deep CNN architectures and com-
bined them in an ensemble, showing this to outperform current state-of-
the-art detection approaches. The authors have used transformer-based
architectures to further segment fires, shown in UAV imagery, on a pixel
basis thus detecting the shape of fire very accurately.
Ul Ain Tahir et al. (2022) show a different but equally promising
method of detection. In their work, the authors use a CNN architecture
commonly used in object detection as the basis for their deep learn-
ing approach to detecting wildfires. Their proposed model achieves
high accuracy in real-time fire detection, making it a viable solution
for drone-based wildfire monitoring.
6. Artificial intelligence and explainability
In this review, we have presented a variety of works that utilize
methods that can be categorized in one or several of the subfields con-
tained within Artificial Intelligence (AI). Goodfellow et al. (2016) give a
brief surface-level definition wherein AI can be understood as the broad
field that encompasses all the others. A broadly accepted definition for
this field is that it encompasses every computer system that is made to
mimic any human-like intelligence, which is to mean it usually finds us-
age in classification, object recognition, decision making or translation
tasks.
This section gives a broad overview of methods that build the basis
of some AI methods and also the major subcategories within AI that
were used by the presented works.
6.1. Mission planning related concepts
Use cases like Dampage et al. (2020) and Fortes (2017) have shown
that autopiloted mission planning software can be viable for rudimen-
tary projects. At the base of this type of software are two root concepts,
path planning and mapping. In order for mission planning software to
work a map needs to be provided in order to plan a path that should be
taken to carry out the mission.
In path planning, there are a number of accepted algorithms one of
which is the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT). The basis for this
is the Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) Algorithm. PRM works by random
sampling points in free space (the map on which to find a path) and
edges between them, basically constructing a graph that maps feasible
paths through space. This method however has two downsides. Firstly
it is computationally intensive because a roadmap for the whole space
is calculated and scales in complexity with the number of degrees of
freedom. Secondly desired start- and endpoints are not considered. To
combat these downsides RRT (LaValle, 2018) was introduced. It works
on the same premise as PRM, but differs in that it builds a tree rather
than a graph. This is to mean that there is a single root node and every
subsequent node is connected to only one parent node. On a base level,
the algorithm builds a tree by again random sampling the free space
but in a loop where after a sample is taken, the nearest node attached
to the tree is determined and connected. If a start- and endpoint are
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
to be considered two separate RRT’s are constructed with both start-
and endpoint being the root. Both trees are grown until they can be
connected, thus finding a path that goes from one to the other. Though
this approach alleviates the before mentioned problems it is still not
the most optimal way of finding a path and therefore works to improve
upon it is still being done, as demonstrated by Rodriguez et al. (2006)
who used obstacle information to optimize the direction the tree grows
in.
Another popular path-planning algorithm is the A* algorithm. This
algorithm works by assigning a cost to every available path from start
to goal and taking the least costly. This is done by calculating two vari-
ables commonly denoted as g and h, where g is the distance to the next
node on the graph and h is the distance to the goal. These variables are
usually calculated through either determinate or approximate heuris-
tics. Where g can usually be measured, h tends to be approximated via
a Manhattan distance for example. The previously mentioned cost can
be understood as a weighted sum of g and h at every step of the path
until the goal is reached. Once the cost for every path is calculated the
most efficient, according to the implemented heuristics, is chosen. As
with RRT, researchers constantly work on improving the A* algorithm
and adapting it to new fields as shown by Erke et al. (2020), Tang et al.
(2021) and Ju et al. (2020).
Even though there are a number of algorithms in path planning the
last we are going to mention is Dijkstra’s algorithm. This algorithm
works by calculating the shortest path from a source node to every
other node in a graph. This is done by saving tables for every node
and their associated cost which can be understood as the distance. In
the end the path with the least associated cost to get from the starting
point to the goal is chosen. It is quite intuitive, that a method like this is
rather inefficient from a computational standpoint, which is why there
are constant improvements made, one of which is the before mentioned
A* algorithm. More recently this is demonstrated by Mirahadi and Mc-
Cabe (2021).
All of the mentioned path-finding algorithms have in common, that
they only work if there is some form of a representation of the environ-
ment which would usually be a map. This runs into problems however
when there is no representation available of the environment a ground
vehicle or drone is in. To combat this a method called simultaneous lo-
calization and mapping (SLAM) is used. SLAM as a theoretical problem
was introduced in 1986 and since has been worked on to find firstly a
theoretical solution but more recently also practical use in the before
mentioned ground and aerial vehicles but also in the realm of self-
driving cars and many more. SLAM describes a method in which a robot
or a drone maps the environment it is unfamiliar with and places itself
within it. With this method, the vehicle can map its surroundings as
well as its position in them. The mapping part can be achieved through
RGB cameras but also by more advanced sensors like Radar or LiDAR.
While the localization can be achieved by onboard hardware, taking
measurements along the drone’s trajectory which are used to calculate
its position, that can lead to inaccuracies. To combat this the Global
Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) or GPS can be used, however, the
great thing about SLAM is, that it works even in the absence of these
(Alsadik and Karam, 2021). Due to these capabilities, SLAM could have
great applications in fields like forestry where GPS and the like, can be
problematic depending on the density of the forest.
6.2. Machine learning concepts
Machine Learning is a subfield of AI that typically uses statistical
algorithms at the core. ML requires a lot of human intervention in the
way of extracting relevant features and putting the data in the necessary
structure before a model can be fed with it and start learning.
Machine learning methods can be separated into supervised and un-
supervised learning. For supervised learning methods, the data contains
observations that consist of features or predictor measurements and
labels or response variables. The response variables are vital to these
11
Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
methods as they are used to learn. That is to say, usually, they are used
by an algorithm to check its prediction and adjust its decision bound-
ary accordingly. Unsupervised learning methods differ in that they are
used whenever there are no response variables. Typically this would fall
into what is known as clustering. Rather than classifying the data, this
is usually used to explore the relations between the features contained
in the data by finding similar instances, clusters, and analyzing what
features they have in common (James et al., 2013).
6.3. Support vector machines - SVM
Among the before mentioned supervised learning algorithms are the
Support Vector Machines. They were first introduced by Cortes and
Vapnik (1995) and are most often used in binary class classification.
As an example, if a dataset had data points on an x, and y plane that
belonged to two different classes and these classes were linearly sepa-
rable, then an SVM puts a hyperplane in place that best separates the
data points belonging to the different classes. In this simplified example
the hyperplane can be understood as a linear decision boundary. The
SVM finds the optimal hyperplane by maximizing the distance between
the hyperplane and the closes data points, the support vectors, of each
class. This distance or area is called the margin.
However, data usually is not as neatly separable as the above ex-
ample implies. This is the specialty of SVMs. If the data points are not
linearly separable then a kernel function is applied, introducing a new
dimension. In the above example, this would mean the introduction of
a z-axis. In doing so there is more space to separate the data, which
leads to the data points being more easily classifiable. In this case, the
hyperplane acting as the decision boundary runs parallel to the x-axis,
so when plotted on a two-dimensional plot this hyperplane might be
presented as a circle.
Wang et al. (2019) show that even with wide spread deep learning
methods, supervised ML methods can still be superior. The authors def-
initely could have used deep learning to achieve their proposed goals,
however with the data being properly structured and labeled, they
leverage the preferable computing time that is associated with most
ML methods over deep learning. In doing so the authors have kept their
computing time low while achieving acceptable results.
6.4. Deep- and reinforcement learning
Deep Learning (DL) is a subfield of ML and is able to process un-
structured data and requires less to no human intervention, which is the
biggest distinction to classical machine learning methods. Deep Learn-
ing in broad terms typically uses so-called Neural Networks (NN) that
can be understood as a fully connected network of neurons that given an
input, either forwards a signal or not, through the network and accord-
ing to the signals that make it through, gives a probability for different
classes, if used as a classification, at the end.
Lastly, reinforcement learning can be understood as, on a surface
level, a subfield of ML where an agent (the model) interacts with an
environment. The environment provides the agent with a representation
of its current state and possible actions. The agent decides on an action
and gets a reward or a punishment, which reinforces desired behavior
thought to achieve the envisioned goal. Reinforcement learning agents
can also use algorithms found in deep learning, this overlap is typically
called Deep RL.
6.5. Convolutional neural networks - CNN
While the topic of computer vision encompasses a variety of con-
cepts and methods, such as calculating vanishing lines or finding land-
marks in images, for this review the focus is on Convolutional neural
networks, because it finds the most use in the field of drone applica-
tions. This is made evident by the previously presented works of Santos
et al. (2019), Gupta et al. (2022) and Ghali et al. (2022).
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al.
Convolutional neural networks are an adapted version of neural net-
works that were discussed at the beginning of this section. They were
introduced by LeCun et al. (1989) and were invented specifically with
image classification in mind. The main functionality lies in the convolu-
tions that take for example 3x3 frames of pixel values and reduce them
to a single value going forward, by performing a matrix multiplication
with a filter matrix. In doing so, the input images are reduced more and
more and what remains are significant features oftentimes edges. The
values that remain are then transposed from an input matrix to an in-
put vector and fed into a neural network which, as described previously,
outputs a probability for the input to belong to a certain class.
6.6. Deep Q-networks - DQN
Deep Q-Networks are an iteration of Q-Learning algorithms. In Q-
learning an agent learns to traverse a maze for example by iteratively
calculating q-values for every action given a state. This is optimized by
making use of the Bellman equation that can give an expected value for
an optimal policy or an optimal q-value for a specific state-action pair.
Intuitively these calculations are rather time intensive, which is why
q-learning is best suited for smaller state spaces. To solve this Mnih
et al. (2015) proposed an architecture now known as DQN. It works
by not calculating a q-value table as previously described but rather
using a neural network or CNN to approximate the q-values for every
action given a state. In doing so the agent learns faster and is able
to handle larger state spaces that may even be represented by images.
Through backpropagation, the neural network is optimized with the
loss calculated against the Bellman equation, which in turn makes it
possible to approximate the optimal q-function.
6.7. Explainable AI - XAI
The current success of AI is due to three main reasons: (i) The sig-
nificant progress in statistical ML and particularly of DL (for a rough
overview of the differences between AI, ML, DL see Holzinger et al.
(2023)), (ii) the ready availability of substantial amounts of training
data, and (iii) the available networked computational capacity. For
certain tasks, modern algorithms can surpass even human-level perfor-
mance. Regrettably, the most potent ML methodologies (in particular
DL) encounter challenges in robustness and explainability.
The most performing ML models are susceptible to trivial pertur-
bations in the input data, which can drastically impact the output,
leading to entirely different results. This sensitivity is critically signifi-
cant in sectors where data quality is less than ideal. One viable strategy
to enhance AI’s robustness involves marrying statistical learning with
knowledge representation. In certain contexts, employing a human in
the loop could be beneficial. A human expert, although not always,
can occasionally introduce experience, domain-specific knowledge, and
conceptual understanding into the AI workflow (Holzinger et al., 2019).
The most performing ML models are so complex, so high-dimensional
and so non-linear that they remain difficult to interpret, which makes
it practically impossible to retrace and to explain how a result has been
achieved. This not only is a legal concern, but often the understanding
of ‘why’ over a mere classification outcome in many application areas
is more important than the result itself (Pearl, 2019).
This necessity has given rise to the field of Explainable AI (XAI)
(Cabitza et al., 2023). In the past, the use of DL has been predominantly
hindered by their black-box nature, obscuring the internal processes
that link inputs to outputs in a given decision or classification. XAI
seeks to shed light on these opaque processes by illuminating the con-
tribution of specific features or combinations thereof in decision-making
(Holzinger et al., 2022b).
The fundamental aim of XAI is to produce models that are com-
prehensible to humans to mitigate the likelihood of catastrophic errors
or unwanted behaviors (Saranti et al., 2022). We find this particularly
12
Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530
important in autonomous drone flight in forestry, where understand-
ing the decision-making process significantly impacts multiple areas.
The ability to rationalize and articulate AI decisions fosters trust among
stakeholders, which includes forestry professionals, policymakers, and
the general public, and ensures that the AI systems controlling the
drones are reliable. Also, the operational safety, a paramount concern
in the unpredictable environment of a forest, is substantially improved
by XAI. When a drone’s AI can elucidate its decisions, it facilitates un-
derstanding of its choice of path or action, potentially contributing to
the development of safety protocols and improvements. In the event
of unforeseen circumstances or accidents, XAI’s ability to articulate the
drone’s behavior becomes invaluable for establishing liability, comply-
ing with regulations, and assuring ethical standards. By comprehend-
ing the ‘why’ behind an action, experts can finetune and optimize the
drone’s AI, boosting its efficiency and effectiveness over time. In preci-
sion forestry, where high-precision activities such as selective logging,
disease detection, and wildlife tracking are the norm, understanding the
decision-making process can fine-tune AI algorithms for better results.
Furthermore, XAI plays a significant role in environmental impact
analysis. Drones, often employed for environmental monitoring within
forestry, can provide a comprehensive understanding of why certain
environmental changes, like deforestation patterns, tree disease spread,
or wildlife movements, are occurring with the aid of XAI. Such insights
are invaluable for understanding and conserving our natural habitats.
As the role of AI and ML expands in our world, transparency and under-
standing of these systems become imperative. In fields like drone flight
in forestry, the explainability of AI ensures that the systems are not only
safe, efficient, and trusted but also aid rather than impede preservation
and conservation efforts in the name of automation. The importance of
explainability in this context is intuitively evident from the use cases
outlined in this paper, underlining the need for human-in-the-loop al-
gorithms that offer operators an understanding of actions such as why a
certain tree was pruned and the ability to intervene or guide the train-
ing process. This symbiosis of humans and AI is crucial to ensuring that
drones genuinely enhance our ability to manage and protect our forests.
Consequently, fostering both explainability and robustness can
enhance reliability and trust, ensuring that human control remains
paramount. It suggests a partnership model that complements human
intelligence with AI, rather than a substitution - which is the central
goal of the human-centered AI concept (Holzinger et al., 2022a).
7. Conclusion
Conducting this review showed that there is a lot of work already
being done with promising results, using a multitude of approaches.
The common theme as to how drones can benefit forestry, most pre-
dominantly the benefits are the reduction of cost, labor, and dangers to
humans, as well as providing more data that is gathered faster and more
up to date. Interestingly a majority of the reviewed papers use higher
altitude drone imagery, which offers the hypothesis that the use of near-
ground imagery gathered by drones flying through a forest rather than
over, could potentially lead to leaps in usefulness and analogously im-
prove the quality of estimations made based on the same. Furthermore,
this new way of gathering images could lead to use cases that have
so far not been tried or thought of. This forms a very pressing rea-
son, therefore to focus research in the direction of near-ground-level
drone flight in forests with the added importance of autonomy stem-
ming from the benefits found for human resources, safety, and cost.
Future work, therefore, could be directed to explore autonomous drone
flight beneath the canopies as well as exploring how to make the whole
system autonomous meaning, drone battery charges, and the transfer
of data, therefore needing minimal human interaction. For the second
point, explainability becomes an important consideration as with most
systems that require next to no human interaction, understanding what
decisions have been made and why has to be a priority. This makes ex-
A. Buchelt, A. Adrowitzer, P. Kieseberg et al. Forest Ecology and Management 551 (2024) 121530

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