Here is a tale of drones for good, wrapped inside a wider effort to protect and preserve some of the world’s most endangered plants. Over the summer, botanist and drone pilot Ben Nyberg flew his craft while surveying flora in otherwise inaccessible locations on Kaua‘i, and discovered a species thought to have been wiped out apart from a single spot far across the island. Now he’s looking to expand use of drones from not only discovering the hidden survivors of threatened plants like those, but also in harvesting their seeds to ensure they’ll never die off.
Nyberg is the geographic information systems and drone project coordinator for the nonprofit National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) organization, which began using the craft on Kaua‘i in 2016. The move to observe the island’s plant life from the skies was logical amid the difficulties – and considerable dangers – that accessing the island’s often steep, slippery, or entirely vertical rises and…
