Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Evaluate Revegetation Success on Natural Gas Pipelines

The Appalachian region of the United States has experienced significant growth in the production of natural gas. Developing the infrastructure required to transport this resource to market creates significant disturbances across the landscape, as both well pads and transportation pipelines must be created in this mountainous terrain. Midstream infrastructure, which includes pipeline rights-of-way and associated infrastructure, can cause significant environmental degradation, especially in the form of sedimentation. The introduction of this non-point source pollutant can be detrimental to freshwater ecosystems found throughout this region. This ecological risk has necessitated the enactment of regulations related to midstream infrastructure development. Weekly, inspectors travel afoot along new pipeline rights-of-way, monitoring the re-establishment of surface vegetation and identifying failing areas for future management. The topographically challenging terrain of West Virginia makes these inspections difficult and dangerous to the hiking inspectors. We evaluated the accuracy at which unmanned aerial vehicles replicated inspector classifications to evaluate their use as a complementary tool in the pipeline inspection process. Both RGB and multispectral sensor collections were performed, and a support vector machine classification model predicting vegetation cover were made for each dataset. Using inspector defined validation plots, our research found comparable high accuracy between the two collection sensors. This technique displays the capability of augmenting the current inspection process, though it is likely that the model can be improved further. The high accuracy thus obtained suggests valuable implementation of this widely available technology in aiding these challenging inspections.