NEW HAMPSHIRE—When Becky Huncilman started her journey to become an unmanned aerial system pilot, she was thinking about the future.
“I wanted to jump on board before it really took off,” Huncilman said, “so I’d have that special something that’s up and coming in the Forest Service.”

As it turned out, her first UAS project on the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire didn’t just give her a glimpse of the future, it also opened a window on the past, shedding light on a decades-old history of land management on the forest. 

Pursuing UAS training was not an obvious choice for Huncilman, a backcountry wilderness supervisor on the White Mountain’s Saco Ranger District. “Wilderness and drones do not mix,” she said, “because you can’t even possess a drone in wilderness.”

But Huncilman liked the idea of gaining a skill that would allow her to branch out and collaborate with different programs on special projects.

“You get in your routine of doing your day-to-day job,” she said. “And this was something so new and different, and I just wanted to tap into it.”

First, Huncilman had to obtain her commercial drone license. Then, in 2022, she joined the first cohort to attend the Forest Service UAS training hosted by the Eastern Region at the Whitewater University Innovation Center in Wisconsin, a partnership between the city of Whitewater and the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater.

Her first opportunity to use her training on the White Mountain came in the form of a restoration project on the Zealand River, where flooding had damaged an important access road. Hydrologists who surveyed the damage found a piece of land-management history: gabions—wire boxes filled with rocks lining the river—that were part of a larger project in the 1960s to redirect the river and prevent flooding. 

But over the decades, these interventions led to streambed scouring and major erosion, increasing the likelihood of damaging floods. Old LiDAR data, which can capture what’s happening below the visible surface of the land, indicated a nearby floodplain. Yet instead of moving water toward that floodplain, the gabions were redirecting it to a main channel right next to the road.

“So, they wondered, why can't we get this water to its natural place in the floodplain?” said Huncilman.

That question led to a substantial restoration project to bring water back to the abandoned floodplain, thereby saving the road, promoting wildlife habitat, and maintaining access to campgrounds and trailheads.

This fall, Huncilman worked with hydrologist Landon Gryczkowski on a UAS mission to monitor the restoration project. Its goal was to gather LiDAR data and visual imagery to determine if water was successfully channeled to the floodplain, pinpoint any erosion and identify beaver habitat in the area.

Flights were scheduled for Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, taking advantage of a narrow window when the weather was still warm enough to operate the UAS, but when leaves had already fallen, which made it easier to keep the necessary “line of sight” on the drone. Before the flight took place, Huncilman surveyed the area to get a sense of where the drone would be most visible, a challenging issue given the mountainous terrain and heavily forested landscape.

The drone was provided and flown by government contractors (Huncilman does not yet have the full training or equipment to fly this type of mission herself), but her support was critical to making the mission a success. With some additional equipment and training, including an upcoming Forest Service session at Whitewater University Innovation Center in April 2024, Huncilman could play a key role in monitoring the Zealand River restoration project from year to year and following big storm events.

Huncilman is also excited to see what happens as more programs across the Forest Service become aware of UAS technology and the data that drones can gather. 

And her advice for anyone interested in becoming a UAS pilot?

“Just go for it!”