Estimating the size of plant populations is necessary for ecological research and monitoring programs. High-resolution aerial imagery from drones has potential to advance estimation and monitoring efforts, but remotely sensed estimates typically have higher uncertainty than field measurements. Researchers developed a method that accounts for errors in plant counts—such as misclassified, double-counted, or missed plants-- by integrating estimates from aerial imagery with field survey data. They used the method to estimate the abundance of sagebrush plants from ten landscapes in southwest Idaho. Plant counts from aerial imagery alone had substantial error, but the integrated method successfully accounted for imperfect detection and improved estimates. Better estimates of plant population abundance over large areas could help improve our understanding of post-fire recovery, restoration effectiveness, and wildlife habitat availability in threatened sagebrush steppe landscapes.   

Zaiats, A., Caughlin, T.T., Cruz, J., Pilliod, D.S., Cattau, M.E., Liu, R., Rachman, R., Maliha, M., Delparte, D.M., and Clare, J.D., 2024, Propagating observation errors to enable scalable and rigorous enumeration of plant population abundance with aerial imagery: Methods in Ecology and Evolution, v. 15, no. 11, p. 2074-2086. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14421