Effective Use of GCP in RPA Data Acquisition and Mapping

Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAs), commonly called drones, have established themselves as a valid remote sensing platform. These platforms, capable of flying on demand and in often otherwise inaccessible environments, have proven themselves to serve a niche data product where both high spatial and temporal scales are needed by the researcher. The use of RPAs as a research tool often comes the need to establish a high degree of horizontal and vertical locational precision outside of what conventional GNSS provides. Ground Control has been traditionally established with the use of ground surveyed Ground Control markers but is increasingly being established using Real Time Kinematic and Post-Processing Differential Correction methods. In forestry and natural resources science, being able to employ a reasonable degree of precision and accuracy is essential in the utilization of RPA as a data collection tool, yet past and present research trends show that no one method is superior to another and that different applications call for different forms of correction when factors such as cost, time, and efficiency are applied. This chapter explores the use of ground control in RPA data acquisition.