Toxic Cyanobacteria Aerial Monitoring for Microcoleus

Toxic benthic cyanobacteria pose a significant management problem for councils around New Zealand. Microcoleus (formerly Phormidium) is widespread and poses a serious health risk to members of the public, pets, and livestock. Monitoring for Microcoleus is traditionally performed using underwater viewers for cover, or through biomass sampling. The increased availability of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and their use by councils around New Zealand prompted the request for a user guide to be developed, describing the methods required for aerial monitoring of Microcoleus. The user guide details the equipment, field measurements, biomass ground truth samples, laboratory processing, aerial imagery processing, and data analysis required to perform this work. Most of the methods and equipment included in this user guide are applicable to other remote sensing tasks, and councils around New Zealand may use this guide as a starting reference for other classification and mapping work. This online project repository contains: 1) The comprehensive user guide. 2) Video tutorials for council staff to follow. 3) Example data to follow along with the video tutorials.