# data[].attributes.body
A conservation drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle used for surveying wildlife, monitoring and surveying wild spaces, and enforcing protected areas (conservationdrones.org, n.d.). Watch this Ted Talk by Conservation Drones ecologist Lian Pin Koh to learn more about the important role drones have in conserving wild habitat and animals (Pin Koh, 2013).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lian Pin Koh: A drone’s-eye view of conservation | TED Talk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ecologist Lian Pin Koh makes a persuasive case for using drones to protect the world’s forests and wildlife. These lightweight autonomous flying vehicles can track animals in their natural habitat, monitor the health of rainforests, even combat crime by detecting poachers via thermal imaging. Added…

# data[].attributes.body
Drones are an excellent tool in citizen science projects; they allow people from all over the world to participate in conservation projects that help protect wild animals and spaces. Here is an example of how drones have improved our knowledge on orangutans in Sabah (Milne, 2017).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Help us find Orangutan Nests in drone Images from the forest of Borneo. https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/s... Thanks to Matt Jarvis twitter.com/journecology for animal footage Thanks to Hoo Pui Kiat for elephant footage Thanks to SEARRP for supporting this research twitter.com/SEARRP Thanks to HMTF Lombok twitter.com/HMTF_LOMBOK Thanks to UNDP Project twitter.com/UNDPproject Thanks to Uni Aberdeen Biological Sciences twitter.com/UoABioSci Music: Bonobo- Kerala (No Copyright Infringement Intended).

# data[].attributes.body
Strengths -
1) Drones allow conservationists to study large, otherwise unreachable areas in a short amount of time, like orangutan nests (Patton, 2013). Citizen science projects, like the Zooniverse project looking for orangutan nests, allow people from all over the globe to help with conservation projects.
2) Drones have proven to deter poachers because large areas are under surveillance at any given time. Law enforcement has the opportunity to stop poachers before they commit their crimes (Garcia, 2013). Check out the video below showing how drones can track and discourage poachers from poaching (Nuwer, 2017).

Weaknesses -
1) Drones can be viewed as a threat in some areas, especially if there is pre-existing warfare. Drones deployed for "good" reasons, like conservation, may not be viewed any different from "enemy" aircraft and subsequently disposed of (Gross, 2014).
2) Drone technology is growing, but may be moving too quickly for it to be valuable in some remote places. Drones have the ability to capture thousands of pictures or large amounts of video footage in a short amount of time, but if internet usage is limited in remote places (like the rainforests primates live in) then such information is difficult to use in real time (Hynes, 2016).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Liwonde has lost about 50 elephants and two rhinos since 2014 to poachers. In August 2015, the Malawi Department of National Parks enlisted the help of African Parks, a nonprofit that specializes in rehabilitating struggling protected areas.

Since taking over operations here, the group has confiscated upwards of 18,000 illegal snares, made over 100 arrests, installed more than 60 miles of electric fencing and removed 261 elephants to another reserve.

But African Parks also has embarked on an unusual high-tech experiment, calling in a drone team from South Africa. With funding from the World Wildlife Fund, including a $5 million grant from Google, drones are being tested here in the first systematic evaluation of their potential to combat poachers.

UAV & Drone Solutions, the company that employs Ms. Dudley and Mr. De Necker, is the first licensed drone operator in Africa, a certification that permits the company to fly drones up to 15 miles away and to operate at night - crucial advantages, given that the vast majority of poachers are active after dark and few parks are able to carry out effective nocturnal patrols.

The group now operates in South Africa, Malawi and Zimbabwe, and soon will expand to Botswana. Their fixed-wing, bespoke BatHawk drones are outfitted with cameras, video transmitters and telemetry, and with battery changes they can fly for more than eight hours.

"U.D.S. does this better by far than anyone else," said John Petersen, the board chairman of the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation, a nonprofit. "There's no one else in the world we know of that are flying regular missions almost exclusively at night."

The idea of using drones to combat poachers is not new. Conservationists enthusiastically embraced the devices as a silver bullet a few years ago - but disappointment was swift.

Industry-grade equipment and software are needed, but they tend to be well beyond the budgets of strapped conservation organizations. Park managers opted for inappropriate models, too fragile for wild landscapes and lacking the necessary flight capabilities and cameras.

"I don't think the world of conservation has the money to spend that would be needed to make an anti-poaching drone effective," said Richard Vigne, the chief executive of Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

Conservationists failed to do the homework needed to see if drones were actually suitable for their needs, said Nir Tenenbaum, the director of Wildeas, a conservation technology consultancy.

"So many groups want technology to solve all their problems, but usually they don't understand the tech," he said.

Government officials haven't helped. In Namibia, trial flights and training undertaken by the W.W.F., supported by the Google grant, were cut short when the government suspended the use of drones. Other nations have banned unmanned aerial vehicles entirely or have strictly limited their use.

Only recently has that begun to change. In 2015, South Africa established some of the first formal drone legislation, and other countries have started making limited exceptions for their use.

The Lindbergh Foundation's Air Shepherd program, along with the South Africa-based Peace Parks Foundation and the W.W.F.'s Google grant, have covered about half U.D.S.'s $100,000 monthly operational costs.

Despite these resources, Otto Werdmuller Von Elgg, the company's co-founder, has discovered that drones are far from the blanket solution everyone had hoped for.

"I am very convinced that we are onto something, but we're only beginning to understand how this tool can be used effectively," he said. "The challenge now is determining how we integrate drones into existing anti-poaching operations."

So far, no arrests of poachers have been made solely based on drone surveillance, and pilots have only spotted poachers a handful of times. Drone teams often don't get ground support in the form of rangers able to follow up on leads, and must frequently fly without guidance on where poachers might be, according to Mr. Werdmuller Von Elgg.

During trials in South Africa's Kruger National Park, a protected area roughly the size of Israel, "we were told to go find people in this vast area based on no intelligence - it was an absolute waste of time," Mr. Werdmuller Von Elgg said. "We were just turning batteries into noise."

When the drone team at Kruger finally did detect a group of rhino poachers, they called park officials. But officials said that there were no rangers available for deployment.

"It was very frustrating," said Ms. Dudley, who had spotted the intruders. "You get upset with people because they say they want you there and you deliver the service, but then they don't back you up."

But Otch Otto, formerly the mission area operations manager of ranger services at Kruger, believes that limited resources were better spent on proven techniques and technologies, not experimental flying drones.

"The technology is in the research phase, and to dedicate a reaction capability to something unproven does not serve the rhino," he said.

Data analysis has also been a challenge. Currently, drone operators must watch live video feed to detect intruders and it is all too easy to miss the poachers.

"It could be numerous reasons - the operator looks away for 20 seconds, or goes to grab a cup of coffeeand misses it," said Cedric Coetzee, the general manager for rhino security at Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife in South Africa. "It's not going to go beep-beep-beep, and off you go. You have to spot it."

Indeed, pilots at a reserve managed by Mr. Coetzee missed a group of trespassers briefly picked up by their drone. The poachers were discovered only later in a review of the video feed.

Serge Wich, an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University in Britain and co-founder of the nonprofit Conservation Drones, is collaborating with colleagues from the astrophysics department to develop drone software that differentiates between humans and animals.

"Once this is finalized, instead of having hours and hours of video to look at that doesn't have meaningful information, rangers will get a ping when there's a high chance that a poacher has been detected," Professor Wich said.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is that conservationists do not know how to most effectively put anti-poaching drones to use, because there have been no rigorous long-term evaluations.

South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research conducted a two-month trial with U.D.S. and concluded that the technology is "a remarkable support tool," but officials have yet to release the data supporting those findings.

Most evidence supporting drones is anecdotal: Mr. Coetzee said he has seen a significant reduction in park incursions when and where drones fly, but added that other factors could have been at play. Drones may deter trespassers, he said, but they may simply go elsewhere in the reserve.

W.W.F. plans to tease out the answers to these questions by evaluating the drones' effectiveness against poachers here in Liwonde. Trials with two Bathawks and three DJI Phantom drones began in August. The foundation also has begun a test in Zimbabwe.

Whether drones also can help reduce animals' contact with humans is also on the agenda. One unexpected discovery: DJI Phantom drones can steer elephants away from park boundaries - likely because they sound like a bit like bees, and elephants hate bees.

"At the end of the experiment, hopefully we'll be able to say here's some good things you can do with drones and here are the things you shouldn't try because they probably won't work," said George Powell, W.W.F.'s director of wildlife technology.

"We're going to do this as scientists, and hopefully we'll save some elephants in the meantime."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
High Above, Drones Keep Watchful Eyes on Wildlife in Africa

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Liwonde has lost about 50 elephants and two rhinos since 2014 to poachers. In August 2015, the Malawi Department of National Parks enlisted the help of African Parks, a nonprofit that specializes in rehabilitating struggling protected areas.

# data[].attributes.body
Balloon mapping is a low-cost way to take aerial photos using a camera, attached to a balloon or kite, on a spool of string (Public Lab, 2017). While satellite imaging is exact, it's often controlled by government or large industries making "grassroot" mapping an affordable alternative to local people interested in natural spaces or conservation issues near them (Warren, 2010). Additionally, balloon mapping can prove useful in conservation fieldwork research since battery restrictions are non-existent and some places, like Borneo, are so remote that technology use is limited when searching for things like orangutan nests (Klemas, 2015).

# data[].attributes.body
Strengths -
1) "Low-tech" alternatives to drones like balloon and kite mapping integrate well with towns, community groups, and volunteer initiatives better than expensive technology like drones and are generally more accessible (Lippincott, n.d.).
2) Aerial photographs provide real-time, easily-obtained images of the ground (Reading Topographic Maps, n.d.). Images like these can help local people better understand their surroundings without expensive technologies.

Weaknesses -
1) Balloon or kite mapping may be easy to execute in theory, but it's hard to analyze spatial data unless you have specific training in the the interpretation of it, especially when looking at dense areas like the rainforests that primates are found in (McCormick, 2015).
2) Weather conditions can easily influence data results captured by cameras attached to balloons or kites (Public Lab, 2014).

# data[].attributes.body
Bruzzi, D. (2014). Borneo rainforest photograph. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License on Wikimedia Commons.

Conservationdrones.org (n.d.). What are conservation drones. Retrieved from https://conservationdrones.org/what-are-conservation-drones/.

Garcia, J. (2013). Conservation drones as a deterrent to poachers (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Miami University, Oxford, OH.

Gross, M. (2014) Connecting with the natural world. Current Biology 24(14) p. R629-R632.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.07.005

Hynes, C. (2016).

Drones will prove vital to land and wildlife conservation in Southeast Asia. Retrieved from http://www.4apes.com/fr/news/science/item/1499-http-www-forbes-com-sites-chynes-2016-07-31-drones-will-prove-vital-to-land-and-wildlife-conservation-in-southeast-asia-17d2204f411a#top.

Klemas, V. (2015). Coastal and environmental remote sensing from unmanned aerial vehicles: An overview. Journal of Coastal Research 31(5) p. 1260-1267. https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-15-00005.1

Lippincott, M. (n.d.). Mapping with kites in the age of drones. Retrieved from http://mediashift.org/2013/01/mapping-with-kites-in-the-age-of-drones024/.

McCormick, G. (2015).

Ecology on the wing: Aerial photography enhances conservation research. Retrieved from http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2015-news/ecology-on-the-wing-aerial-photography-enhances-conservation-research

Milne, S. (2017, December 18).

Orangutan Nest Survey- Citizen Science. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09kfW3AiS9M.

Nuwer, R. (2017).

High above, drones keep watchful eyes on wildlife in Africa. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/science/drones-africa-poachers-wildlife.html.

Patton, F. (2013). Are drones the answer to conservationists' prayers? Retrieved from http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pdf_files/137/1374628471.pdf.

Pin Koh, L. (2013). A drone's-eye view conservation. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/lian_pin_koh_a_drone_s_eye_view_of_conservation.

Public Lab (2017). Balloon & kite mapping. Retrieved from https://publiclab.org/wiki/balloon-mappinghttps://publiclab.org/wiki/balloon-mappinghttps://publiclab.org/wiki/balloon-mapping.

Public Lab (2014).

Mapping with balloons in Castellón and building community (results). Retrieved from https://publiclab.org/notes/pablo/02-12-2014/mapping-with-balloons-in-castellon-and-building-community.

Reading Topographic Maps (n.d.). Aerial photographs. Retrieved from http://www.map-reading.com/chap8.php.

Warren, J. (2010). Grassroots mapping: Tools for participatory and activist cartography (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

# data[].attributes.body
Balloon and kite mapping is a cost-effective way to monitor changes in habitats and landscapes over time. Check out this interview with aerial photographer Charles Benton to learn more about the logistics of kite mapping in remote settings, which can be applied to conservation fieldwork (Conservation Maven, n.d.).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Filed under : Technology-GIS

For the last 15 years, Charles C. Benton, a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, has been flying kites outfitted with cameras to look at landscapes from above. More recently, Benton has been using kite aerial photography (KAP) in his Hidden Ecologies project to explore what the method can reveal about landscapes. As part of this project, he has been documenting changes at the South Bay Salt Ponds in Northern California where efforts have been launched to restore 15,000 acres of industrial salt ponds back to tidal wetlands and other habitat.

We interviewed Charles Benton about kite aerial photography and the potential for its use in conservation work. We have included some of his images along with a video produced by Make Magazine profiling his work. You can see more of his spectacular images here.
CM: Can you describe a little bit about the methodology involved in kite aerial photography (KAP)?
CB: The idea is to lift a camera from somewhere around head height to altitudes of up to 400 ft above the ground. I keep my kites below 500 ft in deference to light aircraft. To lift the camera I use single line kites that are selected for stability. When I go out in the field I carry about six kites. After watching the wind for a bit I try to select a kite that matches the wind. It should pull strong enough to lift the camera but not too much more or you end up having to work too hard. You then launch the kite and fly it up to steady air. In urban settings that might put the kite at 200 to 300 feet above the ground, out in open terrain you can find steady wind at 100 feet or so.

After the kite reaches steady air you fly it for about 10 minutes to satisfy yourself that the wind is reliable and the kite is performing well. And then, a few hundred feet below the kite, you attach a little string and pulley suspension called a Picavet suspension (invented by Frenchman Pierre Picavet in 1912). This device has a cross with pulleys in each corner. Lines run through the Picavet's pulleys to clip onto the kite line in two places. Below the Picavet cross you attach the camera, which is held in a small robotic cradle - basically a double U-bracket with radio and servomotors. Under radio control the cradle can point the camera in any compass direction, tilt it from straight down to the horizon, and with the flip of a switch change from portrait to landscape format. The radio also fires the camera when you want to take the photograph.

Once the equipment is rigged to the kite line you just let out more line, the kite flies higher and pulls the camera cradle up after it. If the kite was at 200 feet above the ground when you attached the cradle and you let it rise to 300 feet then the camera that started at ground level is raised to 100 feet above the ground. Once the camera is aloft you can walk around to position the camera in absolute space. In the South Bay I have hiked five miles along the levees with the camera aloft taking photographs as I go. I frame each photograph by watching the camera and using the radio to pan and tilt. After the shot is composed, I wait for camera to be still and then press the button to make the exposure. It only takes a few seconds per image and it's great fun.
CM: You've been doing it since 1995 so that's 15 years, what is it about the experience on a personal enjoyment level that has kept you engaged for that long?
CB: Well that's a really interesting question. I'm notorious in my family for picking up pursuits, going through the learning curve, and then discarding them rudely to bounce to the next new thing. I've stuck with the kite photography because it's a challenging blend of many different activities. There's definitely an aspect of invention to it. In building apparatus from scratch - camera cradles, electronics, and various control devices - I spend many an enjoyable hour tinkering at the workbench. And then there's the whole aspect of kites and becoming proficient with flying them. I now sew a variety of kites on an old 1938 Singer Featherweight sewing machine, so there's the joy of creating elegant and sturdy flying contraptions. The tactile pleasure of tuning and flying kites is quite satisfying.

Once the gear is in order kite aerial photography is a great excuse to get outdoors. Over the last ten years I have been out on average once a week to hike and photograph. These have been wonderful explorations of the Bay area and beyond. There's also a social dimension to KAP. If you have a dog or baby more people seem to come up and chat with you; if you flying a kite with a camera on it everybody seems to want to talk about what you are doing and that's often entertaining.

And then there's this notion of composing images without being at the camera. I have started calling it "interrogating the landscape." One of the most frequent questions I'm asked is "can I see what the camera sees?" And I can, by transmitting video down to an electronic viewfinder. Being gadget prone I had fun making systems to show real time video but I found that I never used them. In large part this is because what I really enjoy is watching the camera, imagining being there, thinking about the field of view the camera enjoys from 100 feet or 200 feet above the Earth. As I compose the image in absentia, it involves forming a visual hypothesis. Later, when I get the photograph back, I get to compare my mind's eye view with what the camera captured. In doing so I learn an enormous amount. Why are the relationships between these trees different than what I imagined? Good heavens, look at the old marsh channels that are evident in the bottom of this salt pond. And here are a myriad of little animal trails evident in what I thought of as a uniform surface.
CM: How do you think kite-aerial photography could help conservation practitioners with either restoration or land stewardship work?
CB: You can extract a surprising amount of useful information from an aerial view. In kite aerial photography you have a relatively low-cost, low-tech platform for remote sensing that operates at altitudes much lower than aircraft flying at 5,000 feet or 1,000 feet. With this capacity you could document site conditions before and after interventions such as attempts to control non-native vegetation. You could document a transitional landscape at regular intervals, say yearly, to gauge change over time as might occur after a creek restoration or the breaching of salt pond levees. Since you are in the field with the aerial camera, you can have a broader "ground truth" view for verifying higher altitude remote sensing products.

Yesterday I was out at Drawbridge in the South Bay Salt Ponds (where I have a Special Use Permit allowing access) taking a series of views of Salt Pond A21, which is one of the early ponds to be restored to tidal flow (2006). I've been trying to go back about three times year to see how the pond's plateau, it's shallow center plain, has been changing now that it's exposed to the tides. I plan to do that for maybe 10 years. It's fascinating to watch the changes underway. What was once a lifeless plain of deposited gypsum is now sprouting vegetation along the raised edges of former marsh channels. Two weeks ago I photographed vernal pools at the Warm Springs Wetlands Reserve. There you see concentric rings of Contra Costa goldfields, downingia, and woolly marbles defining the shape of the pools as they dry out. In this trip the aerial photographs became a mapping exercise.

It is evident on our KAP Discussion WWW site that folks from a variety of disciplines - archaeology, wetland restoration, geomorphology, and so forth - are working on extracting rectified maps or three-dimensional point clouds out of the images. So there are number of more quantitative things you can do. But the photographs are, at the same time, really nice visual representations of these environments. They present the subject in ways that are accessible to the public, to policymakers, and other folks who don't think much about remote sensing. So KAP is useful in public relations and education.

Beyond that it's just sort of open to the imagination. I'm a Building Science professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Architecture and I've been wonderfully amused by the KAP-related inquiries that come my way. People are interested in the technique and in ways that it might serve the academy or the professions. For instance, landscape architects wanting paths crisscrossing a campus or a geographer mapping the breathing holes of manatees in water hyacinth mats in Costa Rica. I have talked with NASA about automated kites for the surface of Mars and its fast and thin winds. It's all a hoot.
CM: What advantages do you think there are to using kite aerial photography versus other methods for obtaining aerial images of landscapes?
CB: Well, I think KAP is a nice complement to other methods that provide the high, Google Earth-esque views, which give us a broader context.

There are two interesting aspects to kite photographs. The first is that they are intimate. With KAP you can photograph from 10 feet or 50 feet or 400 feet. In that range from head height to the 500-foot altitude that the FAA sets as a kite's maximum you can choose your scale by letting out or retrieving kite line. I think the other aspect is it is relatively low cost. For $200-$300 you can equip yourself with the necessary gear. Brooks Leffler of Pacific Grove, CA produces a line KAP cradle components that makes assembling a working cradle quite easy. It does take a bit of time to become proficient with what are pretty straightforward kites. And then you have a technique that you can apply over again and again. With digital cameras you can acquire many, many images at a very modest cost.
CM: Let's talk a little about the Hidden Ecologies Project, in which you've been engaging the South Bay salt pond landscape. Can you tell me what your goals are for the Hidden Ecologies project and where the idea for the project originated?
CB: Well, the idea sprang out of a sabbatical I spent in 2003 as an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. I worked on a number of different projects during that pleasant year. One of these involved hiking with Wayne Lanier, PhD, a microbiologist with a passion for field microscopes and citizen science. Wayne was working on a text called Hiking with a Field Microscope and the notion of photomicroscopy in the field. We selected a number of spots around the Bay and went out to photograph the environment through our somewhat unusual vantage points - Wayne through a microscope and me with a kite.

It was entertaining to see how Wayne's and my views of the same place were simultaneously divergent and complementary. I would look at a place through my kite's eye to see colors and textures that related to physical features like moisture, slope, and salinity as well as other patterns. Wayne was seeing the microorganisms that adapted to immediate local environments. In both cases our different views revealed physical gradients and their consequences. We quickly realized it was fun to juxtapose our readings of a given place. So much so that we are still hiking together today

One of the landscapes we hiked in 2003 was South San Francisco Bay and its salt ponds. This transitional landscape has changed greatly since the 1850s. The South Bay has been shaped on one hand by transportation as boats and landings yielded to rail lines which in turn succumbed to highways. Simultaneously, the industry of salt extraction by evaporation changed the bay wetlands in profound ways. Salt production began with small-scale operations of the 1800s, which were largely associated with boat landings, and now all salt production is controlled by one company, the Cargill Corporation.

As I started to photograph the South Bay landscape I realized there were layers in the images, very much like layers of architectural tracing paper. In the layers one sees tracings of cultural geography and the presence of wildlife. Flood control projects and infrastructure crisscrossing the landscape appear as other layers. It became an interesting project to try to decipher and document the landscape. While doing so I became much more aware of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project and ended up getting Special Use permits from US Fish & Wildlife and California Fish & Game that permit me to photograph in normally closed portions of the South Bay. This I have enjoyed greatly.

So Hidden Ecologies is a relatively informal project in which we are trying to document changes in the landscape during this restoration era as they occur year to year. For instance, going back to Drawbridge and Salt Pond A21, I am working on aerial photographs that document vegetation taking root in the plateau of that salt pond. While at the same time one of my favorite South Bay subjects for aerial photography are traces of old salt works that date back to the 19th-Century, for in our day these traces are becoming quite dim. It's just fun to capture these fading geometries as a reading of the place and its history.
CM: What useful information relevant to the Salt Ponds Restoration Project have you been able to discover from the Hidden Ecologies Project and kite aerial photography in particular that might not have been otherwise easily observed by the restoration practitioners?
CB: Well, that's a story still in progress. The agencies have been pleased with my documentation of vegetation coming back to the breached ponds. But my personal favorite example of novel observation is related to a pump house adjacent to the Don Edwards Refuge headquarters. This pump house, situated on the western flank of the southernmost section of the Coyote Hills, is an interestingly detailed little building sporting a curved roof in the Picturesque style. I asked over a few years to where did the pump house pump? No one seemed to know. The pump house was up against the side of the Coyote Hills in a landscape that has changed greatly as highway routes were cut through to the Dumbarton Bridges.

As I did a bit of research I learned that the early 20th-Century Arden Salt Works No. 1 had its crystallizer beds on the eastern side of the Coyote Hills, opposite the pump house in what is now the La Riviere Marsh. If you look at photographs of it from the 1950s it was a major salt work with piles of salt 60 feet high and large industrial buildings. And in the current La Riviere marsh you can see the levees and old wooden flow control gates as remnants of the earlier salt work.

In my aerial photographs of La Riviere Marsh I could see a straight line going through this marsh terrain that led me to discover a 24-inch diameter redwood pipe that was buried underneath the marsh. That pipe went from the pump house through a tunnel in the Coyote Hills to a crescent-shaped distribution basin in Arden Salt Works No. 1. This discovery allowed me to put together the pieces of the puzzle and realize "oh that's what the pump house served." It wasn't a huge tunnel, but I would have never guessed it was there without the evidence of the photographs. I later gave a graphic diagram to the Don Edwards Refuge that shows the buried redwood pipeline and its relationship connecting the pump house to the crescent distribution basin. In retrospect, I am amused by the fact that on a dozen occasions I had walked past a marsh channel where the redwood pipe was visible without ever seeing it.﻿

Make Magazine features Charles C. Benton.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kite aerial photography can give conservation a view from above - Conservation News - Conservation Maven

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Filed under : Technology-GIS For the last 15 years, Charles C. Benton , a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, has been flying kites outfitted with cameras to look at landscapes from above. More recently, Benton has been using kite aerial photography (KAP) in his Hidden Ecologies project to explore what the method can reveal about landscapes.