A Systematic Review of UAVs for Island Coastal Environment and Risk Monitoring: Towards a Resilience Assessment

Abstract

Island territories and their coastal regions are subject to a wide variety of stresses, both natural and anthropogenic. With increasing pressures on these vulnerable environments, the need to improve our knowledge of these ecosystems increases as well. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently shown their worth as a tool for data acquisition in coastal zones. This literature review explores the field of UAVs in the context of coastal monitoring on island territories by highlighting the types of platforms, sensors, software, and validation methods available for this relatively new data acquisition method. Reviewing the existing literature will assist data collectors, researchers, and risk managers in more efficiently monitoring their coastal zones on vulnerable island territories. The scientific literature reviewed was strictly analyzed in peer-reviewed articles ranging from 2016 to 2022. This review then focuses on the operationalization of the concept of resilience as a risk management technique. The aim is to identify a procedure from raw data acquisition to quantifying indicators for the evaluation of the resilience of a territory and finally linking the analyzed data to a spatial decision support system. This system could aid the decision-making process and uses the islands of French Polynesia and its Resilience Observatory as a case study.