Water soldier is an invasive aquatic plant of high concern in the Trent River (Ontario), and consequently the focus of an intensive monitoring and control initiative. Since traditional boat-based monitoring of its abundance and distribution is very labour-intensive, we were called upon to demonstrate a drone-based monitoring approach. Beyond collecting high-resolution aerial imagery (4–5 cm/pixel), we further used sophisticated object-based, machine-learning image analysis to automatically map the distribution of emergent and submerged water soldier.
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