Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated that the Republic of Ireland has 12,000 lakes covering more than 1,200 square kilometers of area. To monitor and protect these bodies of water, the EPA formed the Water Framework Directive (WFD) with the objective of preventing further deterioration of aquatic ecosystems while restoring the health of these same lakes to a standing of good health. Under the WFD, 812 lakes have been identified as in states of deterioration, and at least 600 of them are in remote or inaccessible regions. The EPA awarded €132,000 to the Marine and Freshwater Research Centre (MRFC) at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) to conduct a two year research project in novel ways of testing these hard to reach lakes.

The project was led by GMIT’s Dr. Heather Lally of the MRFC with assistance from Rutgers University’s Jensen Lab in New Jersey, USA. Dr. Lally’s goal was to find ways of collecting water samples safely with the use of drones. To supply the drones, Dr. Lally turned to County Clare’s Model Heli Services (MHS), experts in RC vehicles and drones. The standard way of collecting water samples would require a team of 2-3 people to take a boat out into the water and physically collect samples. While it is a relatively simple and inexpensive process, using a boat has several drawbacks. A boat is a very time consuming method, some missions could take several hours to complete. Another major issue is that the wake created by the boat can disturb the water enough to affect the quality of the sample. Often the team has to wait in the boat for the water to calm down before collecting a sample, adding on time to the process. Having to send people out into polluted waters also poses a health risk to them. And in the case of the inaccessible regions the EPA was interested in monitoring, taking a boat out isn’t even an option.

The first stage of Dr. Lally’s trials was to see if using a drone would be feasible for accurate water sample collections. One of the trials was conducted at Lough Mask, Co Mayo, one of Ireland’s largest lakes. While Dr. Lally flew a DJI Mavic Pro 2 to document the experiment, Mark Broderick of MHS operated the drone to be used for sampling the water. The specific drone was a DJI Matrice 600 Pro, an industrial drone capable of carrying a wide array of payloads upwards of 13lbs. Tethered to the drone was a small boat like device that would float on the water surface to collect the sample. The Matrice was flown 328 feet out from shore before lowering and hovering to a height that would allow the payload to sit on top of the water. The drone was able to successfully collect 2 liters of water along with real-time Physico-chemical data. The water surface was disturbed some by the drone’s rotors, but not enough to damage the sample.

The results of this trial led to some significant findings according to Dr. Lally and her team. In a paper published on the data found Dr. Lally states, “Water sampling times using the drone were 4 minutes and water volume capture rates were 100 percent. Drone water sampling was found to be 2.3 – 3.4 times faster than boat sampling methods, depending on resource allocation.” Dr. Lally did point out that using the drones to collect samples was more expensive than the standard boat method. “Despite the cost differential,” Dr. Lally continued, “drones water sampling reduced the health and safety and biosecurity risks associated with boat sampling.” Dr. Lally also foresees the costs of drones declining in the future, making them an even better option for collecting water samples.

The tests done by Dr. Lally proves that drones can successfully collect water samples from some of the 600 lakes that the EPA previously had no way of conducting research on. This project is the first of it’s kind for any European research agencies and is set to end soon. Dr. Lally hopes that all of the data collected will lead to strategies to restore the health of Ireland’s many bodies of water. When the EPA funded program ends in a few months Dr. Lally plans to petition Enterprise Ireland to develop a viable, long term means of using drones to collect aquatic data.