The Use of Drones for Recreational Impact Monitoring of Public Lands

As visitation to park and protected areas increases globally, public land managers seek to increase the implementation of simple and cost-effective methods to collect indicator and threshold data to address environmental and visitor experience concerns. Unmanned aerial vehicles, also referred to as drones, may be a logical addition to monitoring regimes. This study examined the outcome of using overhead drone imagery to monitor two management-selected indicators, visitor-created trails, and vegetation loss, in a newly established Kansas state park, Little Jerusalem Badlands. Images were analyzed by SamplePoint software in 10x10 meter grids with 100 sample points each. Within the first five months of the park opening, vegetation loss was observed in key areas of Little Jerusalem at rates varying from 2.7% to 42.3%. The formation of one visitor-created trail also occurred during this time. These results confirm the benefit of using drones for long term monitoring of environmental indicators that will aid land management agencies in decision-making to reduce recreational impacts associated with visitor use.