Bluegreen (Cyanobacteria) Agea Blooms in Waterways

I live on a large, shallow lake in Northern California where summer algae blooms (an week) are a problem and need to be monitored by the local water quality agency. In particular, bluegreen algae is a potential health hazard and gets a lot of attention.

Does anyone have experience using DroneDeploy, or any drone tools to surveil this kind of aquatic plant life? I would be interested in hearing accounts of this in being done successfully, and what kinds of cameras or techniques might be employed. Any information would be helpful because I have a contact with the water agency that is interested. Currently the use satellite information, but I assume that’s expensive and not as immediate as what they could do with a drone.

Thank you!

Not exactly your use case, but I have seen someone looking at coral reefs.

Calibrated sensors are definitely a must, I am looking to investigate this further with a sequoia MS camera.
Check out this paper

My tips are, you need a slight ripple in the water, to still and it’s just a mirror. I am not sure what polarizing the lens will do but I will be checking. Aim for a slightly overcast day, clear skies seem to make capturing the water more difficult. I found a slight angle on the shot helps to, NADIR is best for GPS accuracy though.
I am setting up 4 test tanks with BGA at different varying levels, taking a photograph, processing the imagery and see if there is a relationship with the drone gathered data to the actual sample test results that I will get done via a lab.

Good luck, Cheers Mick

You would need a UAV/UAS that could carry a Hyperspectral camera.

http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc17/papers/2017_488.pdf

http://www.bayspec.com/spectroscopy/oci-uav-hyperspectral-camera/