Morgan & Eklund, Inc (M&E), a coastal hydrographic survey company specializing in coastal and nearshore surveys, has announced the purchase and successful field integration of a state-of-the-art WingtraOne GEN II unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as part of the company’s ongoing investment in the latest remote mapping and monitoring technologies.
The WingtraOne GEN II, which was most recently deployed on M&E’s pre-Atlantic hurricane season coastline survey of Martin County, Florida, is a fixed-wing, vertical takeoff and landing UAV with PPK GPS that can accommodate various imaging payloads, including an RGB 61-megapixel camera for photogrammetry, a Hesai XT32 for LiDAR point clouds, and a Micasense Red edge-P six-band multi-spectral camera ideal for biological resource surveys.
This latest technology acquisition comes at a milestone moment for M&E, with the company celebrating 40 years of providing commercial operators and federal, state, and local government entities alike with a broadening range of hydrographic and geophysical services in support of coastal infrastructure planning, beach restoration, and large-scale water management projects.
“M&E’s customer promise, true today as it was 40 years ago, is to mobilize the best personnel and leading-edge technologies available to collect and deliver the gold-standard data needed to inform critical nearshore and coastal management decisions,” said Dave Coggin, Vice President of M&E. “The introduction of this high-caliber UAV to M&E’s toolkit brings a new dynamic to our surveying capabilities, allowing field teams to rapidly acquire multifaceted aerial data sets covering extensive reaches of the coastal and offshore domain like never before.”
The UAV is set to work on several upcoming projects once M&E operators wrap up the current survey of a 21-mile stretch of Martin County coastline to document beach conditions and erosion rates in anticipation of a busy storm period over the coming 6–8 weeks along the eastern seaboard.
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