USDA-ARS Monitoring Water Quality Using Drones
[2:04]

Narrator: On a pond near Chesapeake Bay in Maryland USDA scientists take samples to test for E coli, which indicates the potential presence of harmful bacteria. Overhead they use drones to capture images from the same spots. Later in the lab they'll analyze the sample data and images to identify which parts of the pond to evaluate for potential crop contamination from irrigation water. Yakov Pachepski leads the team from the Agricultural Research Service.

Yakov Pachepski: What we are doing is helping to figure out where, when and how to take samples and eventually we are pretty sure that farmers will use this technology.

Narrator: Farmers who need a simple, affordable way to test irrigation water quality could benefit. This experimental drone captures multiple images. 

Matthew Stocker: Our drone is equipped with five different cameras, one of them's a multispectral camera which does five different wavelengths per shot and what we can pick up on the photographs is something we just can't see with our own eyes. 

Narrator: From the boat and from the shore the team samples in multiple areas and depths. 

Jaclyn Smith: We will typically pick between, anywhere between three to five points and at each of those transects we will do four to five different depths. 

Narrator: In the future drones may also collect the water samples as well as images. The ARS researchers hope this technology will help farmers save time and money while promoting food safety from farm to fork. 

Billie Griffith: We want to make sure that whatever the farmers are required to do that it's not going to put a strain on them. So this
may be an easier way of them doing that by just flying a drone over and seeing what areas should be sampled. 

In Queenstown Maryland for the U.S. Department of Agriculture I'm Pat O'Leary