Fly High With Bo Yang

His parents taught geography using dog-eared paper maps pinned to walls or flattened across classroom desks. Bo Yang teaches it using an aerial device that shoots 4K video at 30 frames per second, capturing 12-megapixel photos, mounted on a 3-axis gimbal with stability control for aerial maneuvers and an obstacle avoidance system. Times have changed and so have our mapping tools.

Now an assistant professor in San José State University's Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Yang uses drone technology to conduct geographic information system (GIS) research on topics ranging from coastal ecosystems to wildfires. Drones can access locations that human bodies have a hard time navigating — the salty marsh mudflats and silty tidal channels of coastal estuaries or inside the billowing, ash-laden smoke of a prescribed burn by SJSU’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center.

“Previously, all research monitoring had to be done manually. But now we can use drones to cover much larger areas, a much quicker way to scan and get lots of good metrics,” Yang explains.

Together with co-principal investigator John Stachowicz from University of California, Berkeley, Yang was recently awarded a $356,000 “Build and Broaden” grant from the National Science Foundation for science research at minority-serving Institutions. They will not only use drones to collect environmental data on keystone, hard-to-reach coastal estuaries, but they’ll also engage students from SJSU, UC Davis, and Foothill, Chabot and Los Medanos community colleges in interdisciplinary studies involving Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) piloting, GIS, coastal science and scientific communication.

Yang’s estuary research focuses on mapping seagrass that grows in the muddy tidal flats off the Northern California coast. As a valuable indicator of ecosystem health, seagrass is a litmus test for understanding habitat deterioration and resilience to environmental stressors. By using different sensors on drones — visible, multispectral and Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) — along with computer vision and AI image analysis, Yang’s student researchers stitch together high resolution imagery of coastal habitats, with the crisp visual clarity of about an inch of land per digital pixel. Six years’ worth of Yang’s collected data is now allowing the teams to track and map seagrass boundaries responding to temperature changes and sea level rise over time.

Using DJI Phantom 4 Pro, Inspire 2, Matrice 300 RTK and Parrot drones, the teams capture varied information. “We have all kinds of different drones that can collect different data in different situations,” he explains. “We have drone sensors that can capture imagery using video, RGB, multispectral, sonar and LiDAR . We have sensors that penetrate soil moisture and sensors that capture information the human eye cannot see as well as things like vegetation health.”

With drone sensors offering unrivaled spatial resolution, time savings and cost-efficiency, the tech continues to evolve rapidly. In the future, Yang expects to be able to work with sensors that capture gamma band (radiation), ultraviolet, infrared (radiation), microwave (high frequency radio waves) and thermal (temperatures). Advances in computer deep learning and AI analysis will expand the types of data that can be gathered and improved drone batteries will extend the drone’s capacity to capture data.