Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Drones) for Remote Sensing in Precision Turfgrass Management.

Precision Turfgrass Management focuses upon managing  turfgrasses on the smallest reasonable scale to provide optimum performance (as defined for the facility) using the minimum human, natural, mechanical and chemical resources. Ground-based sensing equipment has provided great insights into spatial heterogeneity of turfgrass sites to help focus management practices. Unfortunately, extensive post-processing of georeferenced sensor data has been cumbersome and interpretation is difficult. Aerial photography provides effective turfgrass assessment on a broad scale, but the expense of taking frequent aerial photographs is prohibitive. Drone mounted digital cameras provide a new alternative for low altitude imaging. A DJI Phantom quadcopter equipped with a GoPro Hero3 12 MP digital camera was used to evaluate spatial distribution of vertebrate damage, weeds, turfgrass disease, irrigation distribution and research trials. The aerial photographs, in combination with digital image analysis, allowed quantitative measurement of damaged areas that is difficult to duplicate with ground observations. The low price of the drones and ease of use provides turfgrass managers with a new tool to rapidly document and quantify performance of large turfgrass areas in a single photograph.  Periodic aerial images can provide documentation of turfgrass management programs and their impact on turf performance. This new class of low-altitude aerial photography tools may encourage adoption of Precision Turfgrass Management because they are easy and fun to use and because they remove the heavy burden of data analysis encountered using ground-based sensors.