Montana State University Drone Flights - Park County Habitat Types

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… a drone! MSU students TJ Wilkerson, Kyle Roberts, and Karlee Nielson are working on a project to map habitat types along the Yellowstone river. By flying YERC’s drone and taking hundreds of overlapping photos, the students are creating a dataset of habitat types that includes vegetation height, thus transforming two dimensional photos into three dimensional data in a process known as photogrammetry. They will then know, within 5 centimeter accuracy, the three dimensional structure of the areas they survey along the Yellowstone. 

MSU students TJ Wilkerson (black shirt) and Kyle Roberts (red shirt) with the YERC drone, and the green raft they took down the Yellowstone to get to this site.

Of particular interest is the vast floodplain, where the Yellowstone river reached historic flows in June 2022 and deposited significant amounts of sediment and eroded away vegetated streambanks. Because they have this structural drone data from before and now after the flood, they will be able to precisely quantify where and how much was eroded away and deposited in three large sections of the Yellowstone river floodplain. This will also allow YERC to improve the forecasting ability of a total water budget model that also predicts erosion.