Open Data Science Europe workshop 2022

Recently, unmanned aerial systems (UAS) gained growing popularity for environmental surveys and other applications. Each step of a UAS survey requires specific tools, with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) representing an interesting alternative to commercial software. We conducted a review of available FOSS tools for each phase of UAS survey, from planning the mission through pre-processing of the data and final analyses and deriving meaningful results to support the decision making.
Further, we were interested in whether the FOSS tools are used adequately in environmental UAS surveys, and in case not, what are the underlying reasons. Our non-representative survey among both the scientific and practitioners community showed strong interest in FOSS tools. Still we can see the discrepancy between the declared interest and the real use of FOSS. We identified several reasons for such a discrepancy such as the complexity of FOSS softwares, lack of accompanying material like manuals, low user friendliness of the FOSS interface, and last but not the least the fact that many of FOSS show limited functionality so the user must combine several FOSS during the UAS processing chain.