Editorial for the Special Issue “Forestry Applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)”

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are new platforms that have been increasingly used in the last few years for forestry applications that benefit from the added value of flexibility, low cost, reliability, autonomy, and capability of timely provision of high-resolution data. This special issue (SI) collects nine papers reporting research on different forestry applications using UAV imagery. The special issue covers seven Red-Green-Blue (RGB) sensor papers, three papers on multispectral imagery, and one further paper on hyperspectral data acquisition system. Several data processing and machine learning methods are presented. The special issue provides an overview regarding potential applications to provide forestry characteristics in a timely, cost-efficient way. With the fast development of sensors technology and image processing algorithms, the forestry potential applications will growing fast, but future work should consider the consistency and repeatability of these novel techniques.