Tutorial intro: Practical UAV Multispectral Mapping: From Flight Planning to Habitat Classification
This tutorial presents a practical workflow for UAV multispectral mapping, from flight planning to habitat classification. Through a live demonstration, participants will learn how multispectral imagery is transformed into analysis products for environmental applications. The session begins with an overview of UAV multispectral sensors, flight planning considerations, and radiometric pre-processing principles. It then moves into a live demonstration of image pre-processing in Agisoft Metashape, covering the import and radiometric correction of multispectral imagery, image alignment, digital elevation model (DEM) generation, and orthomosaic export. The final part of the tutorial demonstrates image analysis in ENVI, including vegetation indices, region of interest (ROI) creation, supervised classification (Random Forest / SVM), and accuracy assessment, culminating in a habitat classification workflow. The tutorial closes with a brief look at how the same workflow can be extended to hyperspectral data, along with best practices, and practical recommendations for producing reliable UAV multispectral datasets. The tutorial is aimed at graduate students, researchers, engineers, and environmental professionals interested in UAV multispectral remote sensing and environmental mapping. As the software used (Agisoft Metashape and ENVI) requires commercial licenses, participants will not be expected to follow the workflow on their own computers during the session. Instead, the emphasis will be on understanding the complete workflow, processing decisions, and best practices that can be applied using a variety of software platforms.