Methodology for automated greenhouse gas data collection and transmission to cloud repository using low-cost drones
Antonio Carlos Daud Filho, Glauco Caurin, José Reinaldo Silva, Elinilson Vital, Emilio Carlos Neli Silva
- Journal
- ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT
- Autor
- Antonio Carlos Daud Filho, Glauco Caurin, José Reinaldo Silva, Elinilson Vital, Emilio Carlos Neli Silva
- Book Title
- Volume
- 198
- Página(s)
- 1--17
- DOI
- 10.1007/s10661-026-15478-9
- Publicada
- 2026
- Month
- Tipo de Documento
- Artigo em Revista
- Abstract
- Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are crucial for monitoring and mitigating climate change and the degradation of sensitive biomes. Such demand motivates the search for automated processes to collect and manage GHG emissions data, with open access to researchers and institutions working with sustainability. This work proposes an automated data-collection process using low-cost drones, with direct data transfer to a cloud-based data space. Low-cost drones were equipped with onboard sensors to measure CO2 and methane emissions. The focus was not on data accuracy but on automating data collection and transmission, drone design specifications, and testing, exploring the balance between data accuracy and low-cost sensors. The first practical experiments demonstrating the system’s capabilities used a drone prototype with simple sensors in a controlled environment, sending data to a cloud-based data space called Digital Amazon (intended to store GHG emissions from the Amazon Forest). The drone design addressed aspects such as avoiding interference during data collection and trajectory adjustment, data transfer, and the final composition of datasets in the cloud. We claim that these partial results justify further real-world applications in forests and other biomes, such as the Atlantic Forest and the cerrado, as well as in urban environments. The perspective for new communication approaches using LEOS (Low Earth Orbit Satellite) and VLEOS (Very Low Earth Orbit Satellite supports this assumption and will certainly reduce latency in communication, but would not improve the efficiency of the current prototype.
- Keywords
- Publisher
- Springer
- URL