Upending the basin: drone count

You’ve heard of the annual Audubon bird count. Now you can take part in a drone count. Not the bees – the unmanned aircraft. Here at Great Lakes Echo we’ve been running a series of stories about the use and potential of unmanned aerial vehicles. If nothing else, we’ve discovered that no one seems to have a clue of how many of these things are out there.

A drone is still a drone by any other name

We’re always on the look out for innovative stories and reporting techniques at Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. In a couple weeks we’ll launch a series on civilian applications of drones for gathering information about the environment. I teach a course encompassing remote sensing, including the use of drones, as newsgathering tools. So a story in the print edition of the New York Times, Drones Offer Journalists a Wider View, caught my eye at Monday’s breakfast table. It’s an interesting enough piece about a controversial technology.