A view from above: A view from above: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide a new tool for assessing liana infestation in tropical forest canopies

1. Tropical forests store and sequester large quantities of carbon, mitigating climate change. Lianas (woody vines) are important tropical forest components, most conspicuous in the canopy. Lianas reduce forest carbon uptake and their recent increase may, therefore, limit forest carbon storage with global consequences for climate change. Liana infestation of tree crowns is traditionally assessed from the ground, which is labour-intensive and difficult, particularly for upper canopy layers. 2. We used a light-weight unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to assess liana infestation of tree canopies from above. We used a commercially available quadcopter UAV with an integrated, standard three-waveband camera to collect aerial image data for 150ha of tropical forest canopy. By visually interpreting the images, we assessed the degree of liana infestation for 14.15ha of forest for which ground-based estimates were collected simultaneously. We compared the UAV liana infestation estimates with those fr...