Another Thing You Can Do With a Drone

May 10, 2016
Ec Jk

The military uses them. Amazon plans to deliver packages with them. One of my fellow editors here at Forester used his to photograph a friend’s wedding. Now an environmental organization wants you to put your drone to use predicting the future.

Since January, the Nature Conservancy has been asking California residents to post photographs of the coastline: flooded areas, eroding cliffs, storm surges. The idea is to capture conditions at high tide or during the worst of the flooding. The geotagged images collectively can help show whether the models that predict what sea level rise will look like are accurate.

The project is called the El Niño Monitoring Initiative. El Niño conditions bring heavier-than-normal rains, and the organization says that by photographing these conditions, we can get a better sense of the future of our shorelines and coastal habitats.

“The models are good and the results of different models mostly agree with one another, but they would benefit from ground-truthing,” says Sarah Newkirk, Senior Coastal Project Director for the Nature Conservancy in California. “El Niño is a great opportunity to validate the models. It’s like looking through a crystal ball into a future of higher water levels and more frequent and severe storm events.”

If you don’t have a drone, a photo from your smartphone will do. Photographers can post their images to Flickr with the hashtag #elninoca. If you’re in California and would like to participate, tips for taking photos and staying safe while doing so are available here

About the Author

Janice Kaspersen

Janice Kaspersen is the former editor of Erosion Control and Stormwater magazines.