Pioneering research reveals tree-mendous potential of inexpensive drones to help community forests flourish and unlock restoration funding - University of Bristol

Restoring forests at a community level can contribute significantly to helping reach global net zero and biodiversity goals.

Accessing carbon and nature payments from governments and other organisations often requires robust measurements to quantify restoration’s positive impact, but these can be beyond the capacity of community organisations.

New research, led by the University of Bristol, could provide an answer to this challenge. Its findings show how small, inexpensive drones combined with free, open source software can be used by community forest organisations to calculate and monitor the amount of carbon stored in their forests.

The study results, published in PLOS One, demonstrate that carbon measurements gathered in this way are sufficiently accurate for establishing ongoing restoration monitoring, whilst being much simpler and cheaper than alternative methods, such as satellites and field-based surveys.

Lead author Dr Ben Newport, Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment, said: “Our findings are exciting because they outline a clear and cost-effective workflow for upscaling accurate, transparent forest carbon monitoring from small field plots to tens of hectares – a scale that aligns well with community forests. This could potentially enable community forest groups around the world to engage with restoration funding schemes that would otherwise be beyond their technical capacities and, importantly, democratises data collection and ownership.”