Why UPEI has the largest drone fleet for a Canadian university

Every summer, a team of P.E.I. scientists goes out on the road, stops at remote locations near the Island's shoreline or by some farm field, unloads thousands of dollars' worth of equipment and gets ready for takeoff.

"Basically if the weather is good in the flying season, which is like spring through the fall, we're basically out every day," said Andy MacDonald, who works with the University of Prince Edward Island's climate lab.

He joined the lab when he was pursuing a master's degree in environmental sciences.

"You get out there, you kind of set everything up, and then you're kind of there for the day, or like half a day, flying.... Then you kind of pack up and move to the next one."

MacDonald, one of the climate lab's two full-time drone pilots, is responsible for helping manage what UPEI says is the largest drone fleet for a Canadian post-secondary institution.

"When I was doing my undergrad [in chemistry], I never would have even considered the possibility of doing something like this," he said. "Just sort of happened."

Twenty-nine drones are used for everything from monitoring farmland to figure out which areas produce higher yields, to surveying how climate change affects coastal erosion rates.

"We've been in this business for over six years now, and we're one of the first research groups in the world to undertake this type of activity," said Adam Fenech, the director of the climate lab and the man who spearheaded such initiatives.

"These applications are not happening solely here on Prince Edward Island. But we certainly have been ... early to the game."

The coastal erosion monitoring initiative is Fenech's most high-profile research project in P.E.I., and the reason why the fleet exists in the first place.

Back in 2016 when his team started collecting the data, all its measures were taken on the ground.

"We had put in a bunch of measuring pins all around the Island to give us sort of like an early warning system to see [year to year] the distance between the pins and the coastline ... but we soon found out that those pins were sort of not enough," Fenech said.

"With the drones, we can fly the full run of the beach. Sometimes that's you know, a couple of kilometres long. And then we can use that imagery year to year to determine how much erosion is occurring."

Since their implementation of drones for that project, the team has branched out. Climate lab drones are now doing things such as examining the damage wind turbines on the coastline receive from salt particles in the air.