Monitoring flooding and other natural disaster responses

Confluence of the middle and coastal forks of the Willamette River April 8th, 2019

One of the very cool things about libraries in the 21st Century is that we support a host of tools for research.  One of these is a UAV or remote-controlled aerial vehicle such as a quadcopter.  Given that we had significant rainfall in the last 48 hours, I decided to capture some of the flooding on the way in to work today.  Yes, this was with my personal quadcopter, but it just as easily could have been a researcher or graduate student working on a project with the Library’s copter.  The UO Libraries supports a Phantom IV Pro quadcopter, and it is available for research projects such as something like disaster response and monitoring or almost any other project where you need an aerial view.  The power of these UAVs or drones is that you can get one up and running, into position, and collecting data in just minutes.  Of course, careful planning makes for a better experience, but when time is of the essence, a quadcopter might just be able to do the job.

Willamette River, Coastal Fork – Seavey Loop RD.  near Mt Pisgah, 4/8/2019.