Small unmanned aerial systems comparative analysis for the application to coastal erosion monitoring

The low operating cost and flexibility of sUAS enables repeated surveys of study sites to monitor annual coastal changes and investigate the impacts of individual storms. The majority of damage along the coast of Prince Edward Island occurs during storm events which are expected to increase in frequency and severity and presents one of the biggest challenges faced by residents due to climate change. This study completes a comparative analysis between a fixed wing and quadcopter unmanned aerial system. The impact of using ground control points during image processing resulted in an average image marker to ground control point coordinates difference of 0.1 m and 0.03 m for the fixed wing and quadcopter respectively. Coastal delineation from orthomosaics compared to a ground truth coastal trace using survey grade GPS resulted in an average difference of 0.25 m and 0.21 m for the fixed wing and quadcopter systems respectively. Elevation comparison of the resulting digital surface models to a ground truth GPS survey resulted in -0.117 m average difference for the fixed wing and 0.0224 m average difference for the quadcopter. Furthermore, consideration of cost, time, and ambient factors are addressed. Finally, sUAS technology is seen to have the potential to revolutionize the field of environmental monitoring in low capacity regions, building local knowledge capital for better planning and adapting to the impacts of climate change.