How We Use Drones for Environmental Monitoring

Remotely managed drones are an excellent tool for environmental field services and contracting. Not only are drones fast, efficient, and accurate, but also they help save costs by reducing manpower required for tricky mapping projects. At Environmental Works, Inc. we use our in-house drone fleet for a number of client services, particularly when hard-to-reach terrain is involved.

How We Use Drones for Environmental Monitoring

Why Use Drones for Environmental Monitoring?

There are a number of use cases for drones in environmental monitoring applications. For example, an organization may have been alerted to a toxic spill rapidly moving down a nearby river. The river may be difficult to access on foot, and the chemical spill may be hazardous to untrained personnel. With drone technology, EWI can deploy drone pilots to the spill site as frequently as necessary. Our pilots can capture real-time images of the spill, which is a crucial tool when crafting a remediation plan. Drones are also an excellent resource during railroad monitoring, tank inspections, and land surveying. Drones require far fewer personnel hours than in-person monitoring, saving organizations thousands. This is especially useful in hard-to-reach incident areas like bodies of water or areas of very high – or very low – elevation.

How We Use Drones

We use drone technology to assist with a variety of environmental monitoring responsibilities, including the use cases listed above. We also offer the following drone services:

• Surveying and mapping: Drones can provide geological and topographical information where other devices may fail. For example, drones can carry out high-quality topographic surveys using a fraction of the time required for traditional surveying methods. Drones can also fly at a significantly lower altitude than devices used for satellite imagery. This means that surveyors never have to worry about unpredictable atmospheric conditions such as cloud cover.
• Inspections using thermal imaging: High-precision thermal cameras are a must for sensitive applications across government projects and private industries. These cameras are often used in refinery and pipeline monitoring, as well as other oil and gas applications. Our drones can employ highly reliable thermal imaging to complete pipeline checks or measure leakage during refinery examinations.

Our Drone Services

EWI’s Remote Pilot Certified professionals offer drone services throughout the central United States and through the Rocky Mountain region. We currently use two different types of drones in our fleet. Our first drone type is a Phantom 4 Pro, which offers crystal-clear imagery. Our other drone is a Mavic 2 Enterprise, which offers FLIR thermal imaging. This device offers unparalleled detail capture in even the most hard-to-reach areas, as well as GPS time-stamping for large areas of study. Regardless of your project type, we have the equipment and the expertise to get it done quickly and accurately.

Recently, we’ve partnered with Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, to offer LiDAR drone services to clients within a 3-hour radius of Springfield. This partnership enables us to provide services such as single-day sinkhole and cave identification, detailed topography models, property assessments, and advanced imaging. With these capabilities, we can quickly identify landslides, slumping, and erosion using layered imaging and create both digital and physical 3-D models.

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Drone technology represents the future of environmental monitoring and assessment and our Remote Pilot Certified professionals offer the expertise and accuracy to help you get the job done.

Email our team of FAA-certified pilots and drone experts at drones@environmentalworks.com, and someone will get back to you shortly.  The EWI team can help you assess which of these drones is best for your project, whether you need emergency management or simple monitoring of a construction site or excavation area.