Day 10:

Today was more of yesterday, collecting imagery with the quad-copter as the topoteam collected ground control points to georeference a mosaic of the valley. It was a bit more challenging to fly today because we flew near the beach where the offshore winds were gusting in. But between me and Greg I think our flight skills are getting good as we can land in some pretty tight spots. On one of our routes we crossed into a cattle pasture where Courtney and Greg was chased by mooing cows. One cow is not scary, but a heard of them is. Afterwards we watched Chuck and I am fly their X8. They lost control of the X8 at one point and everyone was a bit panicked as no one knew what to do. It turns out that the auto pilot took control when it shouldn’t have.

Now that the UAVs are taking flight we’re (the UAV group) are beginning to organize and process the imagery. These next two days we’ll be overrunned by imagery so we’ll have to be on top of things. However, I’m not too worried as we’ve set out a pretty good organization method and we’ll use PhotoScan to process the data. Tomorrow there is supposed to be even more UAVs flying, which is always exciting.

As for my project I need to narrow the area of my research to Ka’a’awa valley as Dr. Lee pointed out. He suggested that assessing the impact of land mangement on vegetation species is a good place to start, but I need to refine my question. Maybe I could widen my topic by bringing in other aspects like land management’s affect on hydrology and geology. I could otherwise deepen my topic, but not am not sure how.

Anyway good night world!