Klemas, V.V., 2015. Coastal and environmental remote sensing from unmanned aerial vehicles: An overview. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a viable alternative to conventional platforms for acquiring high-resolution remote-sensing data at lower cost and increased operational flexibility. UAVs include various configurations of unmanned aircraft, multirotor helicopters (e.g., quadcopters), and balloons/blimps of different sizes and shapes. Quadcopters and balloons fill a gap between satellites and aircraft when a stationary monitoring platform is needed for relatively long-term observation of an area. UAVs have advanced designs to carry small payloads and integrated flight control systems, giving them semiautonomous or fully autonomous flight capabilities. Miniaturized sensors are being developed/adapted for UAV payloads, including hyperspectral imagers, LIDAR, synthetic aperture radar, and thermal infrared sensors. UAVs are now used for a wide range of environmental applications, such as coast...

To plan for wetland protection and responsible coastal development, scientists and managers need to monitor changes in the coastal zone, as the sea level continues to rise and the coastal population keeps expanding. Advances in sensor design and data analysis techniques are now making remote-sensing systems practical and cost-effective for monitoring natural and human-induced coastal changes. Multispectral and hyperspectral imagers, light detection and ranging (lidar), and radar systems are available for mapping coastal marshes, submerged aquatic vegetation, coral reefs, beach profiles, algal blooms, and concentrations of suspended particles and dissolved substances in coastal waters. Since coastal ecosystems have high spatial complexity and temporal variability, they should be observed with high spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions. New satellites, carrying sensors with fine spatial (0.4–4 m) or spectral (200 narrow bands) resolution, are now more accurately detecting changes in coastal wetland extent, ecosystem health, biological productivity, and habitat quality. Using airborne lidars, one can produce topographic and bathymetric maps, even in moderately turbid coastal waters. Imaging radars are sensitive to soil moisture and inundation and can detect hydrologic features beneath the vegetation canopy. Combining these techniques and using time-series of images enables scientists to study the health of coastal ecosystems and accurately determine long-term trends and short-term changes.

Interpretation of remote sensing reflectance from coastal waters at different wavelengths of light yields valuable information about water column constituents, which in turn, gives information on a variety of processes occurring in coastal waters, such as primary production, biogeochemical cycles, sediment transport, coastal erosion, and harmful algal blooms. The Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) is well suited to produce global, seasonal maps and specialized observations of coastal ecosystems and to improve our understanding of how phytoplankton communities are spatially distributed and structured, and how they function in coastal and inland waters. This paper draws from previously published studies on high-resolution, hyperspectral remote sensing of coastal and inland waters and provides an overview of how the HyspIRI mission could enable the retrieval of new aquatic biophysical products or improve the retrieval accuracy of existing satellite-derived products (e.g., inherent optical properties, phytoplankton functional types, pigment composition, chlorophyll-a concentration, etc.). The intent of this paper is to introduce the development of the HyspIRI mission to the coastal and inland remote sensing community and to provide information regarding several potential data products that were not originally part of the HyspIRI mission objectives but could be applicable to research related to coastal and inland waters. Further work toward quantitatively determining the extent and quality of these products, given the instrument and mission characteristics, is recommended.