Drone imagery to create a common understanding of landscapes

Abstract

Negotiated solutions among contrasting land use interests in the nexus of water, energy, food and ecosystems require cooperation between actors with different viewpoints and backgrounds. We suggest aerial imagery and videos, captured by drones, to be “boundary objects”, easily interpretable landscape representations that might create a common understanding across stakeholders through their universal interpretability. We collected drone imagery and videos from different angles of a wide range of landscapes in Zambia, showing agricultural areas, forests, wetlands and water infrastructure. Then, we took the imagery back to the field to probe the perceptions of multiple stakeholders, including staff from both governmental and non-governmental organizations, hydropower operators, small- and large-scale farmers. In focus group discussions, we assessed the interpretability of oblique images, taken at an angle by a video drone, compared to nadir (vertical) imagery from Google Earth and from a high-end mapping drone. We show that oblique images produced better identification results across all groups of stakeholders, but especially from small-scale farmers, suggesting this type of imagery is helpful to empower people who lack previous experience in interpreting nadir images. Overall, the appreciation of the aesthetic value and the perceived professional benefits of drone imagery are high, but technical and legal barriers impede a wider adoption of the technology. While we highlight ethical concerns and technical limitations, we suggest that conservationists and environmental planners could benefit from a critical use of affordable video drones so as to produce intuitive landscape representations useful for more effective multi-stakeholder collaborations.