Almost 70 percent of the planet's people lack access to formal land rights system, and the problem is even worse for women - like women in the Krusha e Madhe village in Kosovo, who are attempting to rebuild after the end of the Balkan conflicts. The World Bank has launched a $12 million Real Estate and Cadastre Project in Kosovo to address these land rights issues, and has recently begun to experiment with using drone imagery to create high-definition maps of areas that have yet to be added to the national cadastre system.

A team from the World Bank's Innovation Labs traveled to Kosovo with a Sensefly eBee drone in December 2015 to carry out a cadastral mapping activity, in concert with the National Mapping Authority of Kosovo. The group ultimately carried out 25 flights across 1,581ha, collecting 11,315 photographs with a resolution of up to 3 CMs per pixel. The team was able to create an orthophoto depicting a 300 hectare area in just 24 hours, a considerable time improvement over ground-based surveying methods. The World Bank hopes that Kosovo cadastral mapping authorities will continue to integrate UAV imagery into their work, as the Real Estate and Cadastre Project continues to help more Kosovars get access to functioning land rights systems.

Over 150 UAV flights were carried out during the World Bank’s Post Disaster Needs Assessments following Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu in 2015. The World Bank faced a “Big Data” challenge as they were already overwhelmed with other datasets. To this end, the Bank activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN), which led to the rapid analysis of both nadir imagery and oblique imagery to identify disaster damage to buildings. Volunteers from the DHN analyzed well over 4,000 aerial images in just a matter of days. Months after these efforts, the annotated imagery was used to create automated feature-detection algorithms by drawing on computer vision and deep machine learning techniques. At present, these algorithms can automatically determine with 95% accuracy whether oblique images include buildings in them. The algorithms can thus filter out unnecessary images, thus saving imagery analysts more time.

Tsetse flies can cause debilitating disease in both humans and livestock, impacting health and food security. Spanish UAV-maker Embention has partnered with the International Atomic Energy Agency to create an umanned system capable of releasing large numbers of irridated, sterilized male tsetse flies into the wild, reducing the total population. As of April 2016, the fixed-wing Embention UAV was undergoing testing in Ethiopia. Ethiopian authorities have been releasing sterilized flies from manned aircraft for years to combat the parasite that causes trypanosomiasis (popularly known as "sleeping sickness.")

Why use a drone to deliver the flies? Precision and price: the insects can be delivered in more specific areas, and operating the UAV is less expensive than hiring the services of an airplane and a human pilot. The "Drones Against Tsetse" project ultimately hopes to use the technology to rid a 200,000 square KM area in Ethiopia of tsetse flies, making it usable again for human habitation and agriculture. The UAV project is also supported by Ethiopian Ministry of Livestock and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

Glaciers are an important water source for communities in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range - but warming climates could spell trouble for local water security. Ohio State researchers have begun using maps made by custom-built drones to study the impact of climate change on glaciers and wetlands, information that communities can use to plan ahead as the planet warms. With the UAV, scientists are able to inexpensively collect 10-cm resolution imagery in cloudy conditions that would obscure satellite views.

Thermal cameras allow the researchers to identify which parts of the glacier are melting fastest, and an aerial perspective afford them a more “big picture” perspective than can be provided by mre traditional ground surveys. Not all the news is bad: the ongoing Ohio State study has found that the Cordillera Blanca groundwater system is in fact storing some glacial melt water, potentially buffering the water-supply decrease caused by the glacier meltdown.

More worrisomely, UAV imagery indicates the Llaca glacier is thinning by 0.7 meters on average each year. Drone-data collected by ongoing glacier observation will, it is hoped, help water managers make better climate-change driven decisions in other glacial areas.

Stemming the flow of conflict diamonds requires accurate production tracking - a serious challenge in remote areas in developing countries, like Forecariah Prefecture in western Guinea. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) experimented with the use of a small UAV for mapping and monitoring artisanal diamond mining sites in June 2014, as part of the world's path towards formalizing the diamond industry under the Kimberley Process.

The USGS/USAID team used an inexpensive DJI Phantom 2 drone for their pilot project, collecting both video and still images with 2 different digital camera models, while flying at an average altitude of 100 meters above the ground. The team found the imagery to be higher-resolution than available satellite imagery of the area, and noted that the ease of collecting the data with the drones could make artisanal and small-scale mining surveys more easy to regularly repeat.

With the images, the team produced 10 cm resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) of mining areas, as well as high-resolution ortho-image mosaics of the areas of interest. These products will be used to locate and better understand area diamond deposits, and to conduct participatory mapping exercises to decrease conflict over desirable mining land.

Bites from the Aedes mosquito are the primary sources of spreading the Zika and dengue viruses. RTI is researching integration of UAV technology into Aedes mosquito surveillance and vector control efforts at five test sites in Guatemala.

Vector control attempts to limit or eradicate insects that transmit diseases such as Zika and dengue. Using UAVs, RTI collected aerial images that were analyzed to identify and map breeding sites—such as cisterns, pots and buckets, old tires, flower pots, and unused fountains—that could potentially support Aedes mosquito populations near rural villages. These images were aggregated into accurate maps to support targeted application of larvicides at these potential breeding sites. The maps can also be used in communication materials to demonstrate the specific risk conditions for a given village.

The Mongolian capital of Ulaan Baatar is one of Asia's fastest-growing cities, with an ever-expanding "suburban" area made up largely of gers, the traditional residences of Mongol nomads. In 2015, with support from Australian Aid, the Asia Foundation partnered with Ulaan Baatar City Municipality officials and local land surveyors to carry out a UAV mapping project of these new neighborhoods, in an effort to help local authorities add these new ger areas to the map and expand residents access to basic city services, such as water and waste collection.

A Trimble UX5 fixed wing mapping UAV was used to collect over 100 square KM of elevation data and aerial imagery of ger districts outside Ulaan Baatar, at a detailed 9.6 CM resolution. These raw images were used to create a wide variety of useful GIS data outputs, from contour maps to road maps to accurate maps of newly-formed neighborhoods. During a weekend "Map-a-Thon," Mongolian citizens were invited to use the raw UAV imagery - posted on the OpenStreetMap platform - to create their own maps, recording features and details that are often invisible to professional surveyors. City officials will use the UAV imagery to inform their city planning efforts in the near future, as the informal ger neighborhoods continue to expand.

A combined team used UAV imagery and crowd-sourcing technology to conduct wildlife counts at the Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve in Namibia, testing the effectiveness of aerial imagery for both wildlife census work and crowd-sourced solutions. To support the wildlife count crowdsourcing effort, the MicroMappers organization adapted its "Aerial Clicker" platform, which was originally developed to crowdsource the tagging of aerial imagery of humanitarian crises. The MicroMapper team realized that wildlife counts were an ideal non-disaster method of testing the technology.

Working with UAV-focused Swiss NGO Drone Adventures, Polytechnic of Namibia, and l’École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the team shot over 25,000 aerial photos of conserved land at Kuzikus, using Sensefly's eBee fixed wing mapping drone. Over the course of a weekend, 500 volunteers analyzed the imagery using the MicroMappers platform, successfully identifying many animal species in the images and helping rangers get a more accurate sense of wildlife numbers in the reserve. It is hoped this crowdsourcing technology will be similarily useful when it is deployed to quickly analyze post-disaster imagery - shot by drones or satellites.

In Borneo, a type of malaria parasite (Plasmodium knowlesi) most common in macaque monkeys has begun to infect humans, even children, families, and others who rarely spend time in the forest. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK are using a drone to map malaria affected communities and surrounding areas, in an effort to understand how and why this cross-species jump is taking place.

The fixed wing Sensefly eBee drone used in the mapping project can fly for 50 minutes and carries a 16 megapixel camera, enabling it to photograph relatively large areas. Researchers use these pictures to to generate photographic maps and 3D digital surface models of impacted areas, which are overlayed with the movement patterns of human beings carrying GPS receivers and macaque monkeys fitted with GPS collars.

This superimposition allows researchers to identify places where humans and monkeys are most likely to come into direct or indirect contact - and to gather more clues as to why both species are drawn to some areas and not to others. Current theories derived from the UAV imagery include changes in land use that have made human habitations more attractive to monkeys, and small-scale deforestation that impacts monkey habitat, forcing them to live closer to people. Mapping human-monkey contact isn't their only use: the UAVs are also capable of identifying where GPS-fitted monkeys prefer to congregate, and can even be used to monitor watery areas that are likely breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.