Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are promising tools for many applications regarding soil erosion, digital terrain modeling, geomorphology, agronomy, and natural processes mapping and monitoring in general. Kites, blimps and other flying platforms already proved successful tools for photogrammetric measurements and mapping. The recent increase of performance and endurance of electronically powered flying platforms, such as multi-copters and fixed-wing airplanes, and decreasing size and weight of different sensors and batteries leads to increasing popularity of UAS for scientific purposes. Modern UAS work flows include guided flight plan generation, 3D GPS navigation for fully automated piloting, and automated processing. Equipped with normal RGB cameras, multi- and hyperspectral sensors, radar, or other sensors, they provide a cheap and flexible solution for creating multi-temporal data sets which can be utilized for new applications related to change analysis and process monitoring.

This relatively new discipline of data acquisition comes with new opportunities and challenges. The aim of this session is to bring together scientists that are working with UAS and share experiences on platforms, sensors, data processing, and applications. The session will provide an overview of the current state of UAS research in the geosciences, and the challenges that need to be tackled.
We encourage scientists that work with small aerial platforms to submit an abstract to this session. Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:

- Platform development
- Light-weight sensor development
- Methods on data processing
- Multispectral and hyperspectral data analysis
- Pre-processing and time-series analysis
- Applications in soil science, geomorphology, ecology, agronomy, precision agriculture, forestry, vegetation mapping and monitoring, etc.