Vertical Aerial Photography Applications

Aerial photographs are used for identification and monitoring of plumes of suspended solids, domestic or industrial wastes entering natural water bodies, oil spills, or lake eutrophication. Furthermore, airphoto interpretation is an effective technique for aquatic macrophyte, wetland, land cover and forest mapping and inventory (Lillesand & Kiefer, 1987). It has been successfully used for wildlife habitat mapping, classification and temporal habitat change monitoring.

The advantage of this method is obvious. A complete picture of large tracts of land or water can be obtained. This results in increase of data acquisition accuracy, and enormous savings of manpower hours required for conventional ground sampling, laboratory time as well as data analysis.

Unfortunately, despite of its many possible uses and advantages,  remote sensing seems to be rather underutilized (Roughgarden et al., 1991). This sometimes happens to detriment of many. For example, an $8,000,000 water intake for drinking water purposes was built in Lake Superior between Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin based on ground sampling without use of satellite imagery or aerial photography. The intake was constructed in an area exceeding the turbidity limits for drinking water 50% of the time. Aerial photos proved to be very useful during a law suit which resulted (Scherz and Van Domelen, 1973).
 

Monitoring of plumes of suspended solids, domestic or industrial wastes entering water bodies, oil spills as well as lake eutrophication. Monitoring and management of aquatic weeds, and aquatic vegetation mapping.

North-western portion of Sargent Bay, Lake Memphremagog, Quebec, in October 1997. A mosaic of colour vertical aerial photographs taken from an altitude of 7500' ASL. Note the unsupervised classified image showing consistent colour pattern throughout the bay. Each uniform colour represents identical concentration of light scattering particles (probably algal cells) found within the lake waters.