Free 2-day online course, 18-19 November 2025

Drone-based monitoring is increasingly being used for mapping and monitoring habitats. This 2-day course will guide you through a real-world example workflow, mapping individual Hawthorn shrubs in a rewilding site. It will cover the basics of collecting and pre-processing high-quality drone image data and explain with hands-on Jupyter notebooks (on Google Colab), how to train and run a deep learning (U-Net) model to produce the shrub map.

Whether you work in biodiversity consulting, land-use planning, reserve management, research, or are simply interested in habitat data collection and monitoring, this course gives you the opportunity to have a go and learn how to approach drone-based mapping for monitoring. 

This course will be run by UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology staff.

Spaces are limited. Selection will be random. Some coding and GIS familiarity is recommended.

Please register HERE to apply, deadline Monday, 10^th November.

Contents

Day 1

• How to fly a campaign delivering good-quality image data
• How to pre-process (Structure from Motion) raw image data to mosaicked imagery and 3-dimensional point clouds (i.e., digital surface model).

Day 2

• An introduction on how to train and run a U-net model on mosaicked imagery to map individual shrubs.

The course will take place on 18-19^th November, with 17 November for troubleshooting to ensure your IT setup is working as it should. More detailed timing information will be provided to participants.