Abstract
Negotiated solutions among contrasting land use interests in the nexus of water, energy, food and ecosystems require cooperation between actors with different viewpoints and backgrounds. We suggest aerial imagery and videos, captured by drones, to be “boundary objects”, easily interpretable landscape representations that might create a common understanding across stakeholders through their universal interpretability. We collected drone imagery and videos from different angles of a wide range of landscapes in Zambia, showing agricultural areas, forests, wetlands and water infrastructure. Then, we took the imagery back to the field to probe the perceptions of multiple stakeholders, including staff from both governmental and non-governmental organizations, hydropower operators, small- and large-scale farmers. In focus group discussions, we assessed the interpretability of oblique images, taken at an angle by a video drone, compared to nadir (vertical) imagery from Google Earth and from a high-end mapping drone. We show that oblique images produced better identification results across all groups of stakeholders, but especially from small-scale farmers, suggesting this type of imagery is helpful to empower people who lack previous experience in interpreting nadir images. Overall, the appreciation of the aesthetic value and the perceived professional benefits of drone imagery are high, but technical and legal barriers impede a wider adoption of the technology. While we highlight ethical concerns and technical limitations, we suggest that conservationists and environmental planners could benefit from a critical use of affordable video drones so as to produce intuitive landscape representations useful for more effective multi-stakeholder collaborations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 104571 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-10 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Landscape and Urban Planning |
| Volume | 228 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The drone data collection was funded by the DAFNE project (Decision Analytic Framework to explore the Water-Energy-Food Nexus in complex transboundary water resource systems of fast developing countries), which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement no. 690268. The focus group discussions were supported by ETH for Development [ETH4D Research to Action Grant]. We thank the staff of ATEC-3D Ltd. for image processing. We would also like to thank the Zambian Aviation Authority for their assistance, as well as Ethel Namafe and Namafe Namafe for their help with administrative processes in Zambia, Valeria Renna for data management, Anne Dray, Ivan Novotny and Verena Griess for advice on the methodology. A special word of thanks to Sabine Cnudde for the language editing and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We are particularly grateful to all the 45 stakeholders who took the time to participate in the focus group discussions.
Funding Information:
The drone data collection was funded by the DAFNE project (Decision Analytic Framework to explore the Water-Energy-Food Nexus in complex transboundary water resource systems of fast developing countries), which received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement no. 690268. The focus group discussions were supported by ETH for Development [ETH4D Research to Action Grant]. We thank the staff of ATEC-3D Ltd. for image processing. We would also like to thank the Zambian Aviation Authority for their assistance, as well as Ethel Namafe and Namafe Namafe for their help with administrative processes in Zambia, Valeria Renna for data management, Anne Dray, Ivan Novotny and Verena Griess for advice on the methodology. A special word of thanks to Sabine Cnudde for the language editing and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We are particularly grateful to all the 45 stakeholders who took the time to participate in the focus group discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s)