Development of an Automated Monitoring Platform for Invasive Plants in a Rare Great Lakes Ecosystem Using Uncrewed Aerial Systems and Convolutional Neural Networks

We present a novel method for rapidly and precisely monitoring invasive plant species within rare and Great Lakes endemic coastal ecosystems. Our monitoring platform comprises: 1) an Uncrewed Aerial System capable of collecting high-resolution imagery in a precise and repeatable manner; 2) software enabling ecologists to annotate this imagery to identity invasive plant species of interest; 3) neural network-based algorithms for identifying...