Forest Service UAS Policy
The Mission of Forest Service Aviation is to:
Provide safe, efficient and coordinated aviation support for agency operations; to support partnership agreements; and to meet current and future needs through innovation and technology in order to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of the Nation’s forests and grasslands.
Incident Response and Prescribed Fire
The Forest Service UAS program seeks to reduce risk exposure during incident response and prescribed fire projects. UAS provides an excellent option to remove crewed aviation from the low altitude, slow airspeed flight profiles. The largest applicable mission set to reduce exposure on is with aerial ignition. In recent years the Forest Service has made large strides to replace helicopters in the performance of aerial ignition.
UAS also provides aerial thermal intelligence for firefighters and other resources on the ground. They can fly in almost any condition, day and night to provide additional situational awareness. Lastly, UAS capabilities can also increase safe operations by extending the coverage of radio communications networks in remote areas during incident operations.
Resource Management
The Forest Service UAS program is the Agency’s UAS program, making the UAS technology available to every aspect of the agency. To meet that goal the UAS program is supporting more efficient execution of resource management activities throughout the agency. UAS enables the data collection at the desired location, time and level of detail to more efficiently and accurately manage natural resources. Today, UAS is being used in the Forest Service to address numerous resource management applications, including but not limited to, detect and map the conditions of forests affected by insects and other organisms; map and measure particular forest structure characteristics, such as the number of trees, their heights and canopy cover; conduct precise topographic surveys of recreation areas to plan and engineer improvements; closely view and inspect the condition of infrastructure such as bridges and dams; and, map the severity of damage after wildland fires and other disaster events.
Please see the links below to reports and other information that demonstrate how the Forest Service is using UAS and examples of the types of data that are produced.
Annual Forest Service UAS Activity Reports
• FY2022
Examples of How the Forest Service Uses UAS
What Can UAS Do for You? (Requires an ArcGIS account login)