/1^st August 2018, Catherine Offord/ Unmanned aerial vehicles allow researchers to collect huge volumes of biological data cheaply, easily, and at higher resolution than ever before. Last winter, about 3 nautical miles from Sydney, Australia, marine biologist Vanessa Pirotta was finally able to collect some snot. A PhD student at Macquarie University, Pirotta had been searching for ways to monitor whale health using blow—“that visible plume of spray rising from a whale’s blowhole,” she tells The Scientist.

/28^th May 2018, The Royal Society Publishing by Sabina Roşca, Juha Suomalainen, Harm Bartholomeus, Martin Herold/ Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with digital cameras have attracted much attention from the forestry community as potential tools for forest inventories and forest monitoring. This research fills a knowledge gap about the viability and dissimilarities of using these technologies for measuring the top of canopy structure in tropical forests. In an empirical study with data acquired in a Guyanese tropical forest, we assessed the differences between top of canopy models (TCMs) derived from TLS measurements and from UAV imagery, processed using structure from motion.