Towards a data commons: Imagery and derived data from autonomous and remotely piloted aerial vehicles

Scienists are increasingly using autonomous and remotely piloted aerial vehicles (commonly referenced here as UAVs) to collect large volume of data in a range of different scienific domains. These data are key to providing environmental information, such as terrestrial or marine monitoring including species detecison or collecing atmospheric information. However, the volume of data collected, and the lack of standard workflows make their sharing difficult. The aim of this project is to enable improvement of collection and management of data derived from UAVs by establishing best practices and metadata recommendations through a data commons approach within NERC Environmental Data Service (EDS). Following a data commons approach, the project first defines who the main users and stakeholders are, here referenced as the UAV community and identifies their needs, challenges and vision. Then, we review existing UAV data management practices and recommend a new data workflow to promote Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR, Wilkinson, 2016) data collection and management of UAV data. Finally, we propose a list of topics that needs to be further investigated to achieve the UAV community vision in the future. We hope that the promotion of these recommendations will improve the reuse of data from UAVs and foster collaborations for new research studies using these platforms and the proposed data commons approach will help create new synergies within the EDS.

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