Non‐forest ecosystems, dominated by shrubs, grasses and herbaceous plants, provide ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and forage for grazing, and are highly sensitive to climatic changes. Yet these ecosystems are poorly represented in remotely sensed biomass products and are undersampled by in situ monitoring. Current global change threats emphasize the need for new tools to capture biomass change in non‐forest ecosystems at appropriate scales. Here we developed and deployed a new protocol for photogrammetric height using unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) images to test its capability for delivering standardized measurements of biomass across a globally distributed field experiment. We assessed whether canopy height inferred from UAV photogrammetry allows the prediction of aboveground biomass (AGB) across low‐stature plant species by conducting 38 photogrammetric surveys over 741 harvested plots to sample 50 species. We found mean canopy height was strongly predictive of AGB across species, with a median adjusted R² of 0.87 (ranging from 0.46 to 0.99) and median prediction error from leave‐one‐out cross‐validation of 3.9%. Biomass per‐unit‐of‐height was similar within but different among, plant functional types. We found that photogrammetric reconstructions of canopy height were sensitive to wind speed but not sun elevation during surveys. We demonstrated that our photogrammetric approach produced generalizable measurements across growth forms and environmental settings and yielded accuracies as good as those obtained from in situ approaches. We demonstrate that using a standardized approach for UAV photogrammetry can deliver accurate AGB estimates across a wide range of dynamic and heterogeneous ecosystems. Many academic and land management institutions have the technical capacity to deploy these approaches over extents of 1–10 ha⁻¹. Photogrammetric approaches could provide much‐needed information required to calibrate and validate the vegetation models and satellite‐derived biomass products that are essential to understand vulnerable and understudied non‐forested ecosystems around the globe.

Stereo-photogrammetry provides a low cost, easy to use, and noninvasive alternative to traditional facial anthropometry for the diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). We describe such a system for use in obtaining 3-D facial information in infants. The infant is photographed using three high resolution digital cameras simultaneously while seated in a car seat. The subject's head is enclosed in a control frame during imaging. Technical system tests, namely control frame interpolation, camera calibration reliability, and camera synchronization delay assessments were performed. Direct and stereo-photogrammetric measurements of a doll were compared. Of 275 inter-landmark distances, 100% were within a 1.5 mm error range and 92.36% within a 1 mm error range when the two modalities were compared. Stereo-photogrammetry proved to be highly precise with submillimeter error in landmark placement for all landmarks on the doll. An intra-modality comparison of inter-landmark distances using two sets of images of five subjects showed the stereo-photogrammetric system to be highly reliable, with an average 72.25% of distances within a 1 mm error range. The system has potential for large scale screening and surveillance studies for FAS.