Over the years, students from a variety of disciplines at Unitec in Auckland have participated in projects at CUE Haven or conducted research work in the bush.  Associate Professor Dr Glen Aguilar has been bringing students pursuing a Bachelor of Applied Sciences–Biodiversity Management degree with the School of Environmental and Animal Sciences to do some field work for the Applied GIS paper for the past two years.  Today he brought the latest group to do some hands on work with several different types of drones and the session included demonstrations of different drones for mapping a target area through collecting imagery or photos for image processing.

The group arrived in the morning and included students Amelia, Edmon, Harry, Jay, Jeffrey, Prabhjot, Sophie and Toby.

Over morning tea, Mahrukh gave the students a welcome and quick overview about the CUE Haven restoration project and our future plans.

Thomas then gave a safety briefing and took the group out to Wai Manakitanga, an open area surrounded by regenerating bush that would give the students both a good working platform and also interesting terrain to survey and map.

Glen briefed the students on the objectives of the field trip and the drones to be used.

They then set up the drones and the students took turns flying the different drones.

It was a perfect day for flying.

The students worked together to learn about the drones and their software.

At the end of the session, they carefully disassembled the drones and packed up all the gear.

Before they left, the group visited Mel’s Grove, a stand of kahikatea trees planted in memory of Unitec ecology Associate Professor, the late Dr Mel Galbraith, who pioneered the relationship with Unitec and CUE Haven.

As always, the visit was mutually beneficial.  During the visit the students were able to gain field experience with recent and rapid developments in collecting biodiversity data and in doing this gathering of geospatial data, the status of important species and the ongoing change at CUE Haven can be monitored regularly by future students who will conduct similar field collection and drone flying exercises in future. This will contribute to the documentation of the wonderful progress that CUE Haven has made to ecological restoration in the area and provide a highly intuitive visualisation of the landscape.

We wish the students all the best with their continuing studies and future endeavours.

And a big thank you to Glen for arranging the visit—looking forward to having you back soon with more students!