Massarat, Arya (2020)
Mapping Floral Resources for Bees using Drone Imagery.
Bachelor of Science, Harvey Mudd College, Biology.
Advisor: Matina Donaldson-Matasci.
Poor nutrition among modern day honey bee colonies is contributing to their decline. Yet understanding how the diversity and abundance of flowering species around a colony affects its health remains difficult because of the manual labor required to analyze these large foraging landscapes. We describe a procedure for automatically mapping the species of flowering plants around a colony from overlapping drone images. We developed a pipeline for stitching the images together, identifying plants within them, and classifying each plant by its species. The resulting map of the flowering species surrounding a colony could be used in future experiments that aim to assess how a colony’s health and foraging behavior is influenced by the spatialdistribution of the floral species in its vicinity.
Thesis available at HMC Undergraduate Research Opportunities