Project News

As a part of the support for enhancing the National Forest Monitoring System of Cambodia, the Project is trying to promote the use of fixed-wing drones. Ministry of Environment (MoE) and Forestry Administration (FA) have already started using small drones for their daily works such as forest monitoring. However, the flight time of small drones is short, thus the introduction of fixed-wing drones which can fly longer and cover wider area is needed for MoE and FA. As the first step to use fixed-wing drones, the project organized this training for technical staffs from MoE and FA to learn the basic skills of drone operation and aerial photo processing through the field and in-class trainings.

The field trainings were conducted in Stung Treng for two days each; the training for MoE was held from 20th to 21st April 2022, and for FA was from 26th to 27th in the same month. The fixed-wing drone is automatically operated based on the flight plan prepared by using the special software, while small drone can be flied manually. Therefore, this training put higher importance on the practice of flight planning with different parameters (flight height, flight course, flight area and overlap ratio of photo acquisition) in addition to the basics of drone, necessary equipment, setting of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) base station, and practice for take-off and landing.

After the field training, the in-class training of aerial photo processing for orthophoto and Digital Terrain Model (DTM) creation was conducted.

The fixed-wing drones can be used for daily works related to forest monitoring such as boundary demarcation and zoning of protected area and production forest, assessment of land use and land cover and those changes, as well as detection of illegal logging. As the next steps, the training material will be developed for the future promotion of fixed-wing drones, and the pilot projects will be conducted to apply fixed-wing drones for forest monitoring as on-the-job training (OJT) based on the needs of MoE and FA.

Training participants (MoE)

Training participants (FA)

Drone setting

Flight planning

Take-off

Training of aerial photo processing

Fixed-wing drone used for training