Aerial Imagery of Ynyslas Coastal Sand Dunes in Wales

February 2020 data contains high-resolution aerial imagery covering 8000 m² of the Ynyslas coastal sand dune system in Wales. It was collected during a six-minute UAV flight on February 5th, 2020, by researchers from the University of Huddersfield to test mapping accuracy for bare sand and vegetation cover.

Use Cases

• Classify bare sand and vegetation cover using the 0.01 m ground pixel resolution orthorectified imagery.
• Apply Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry algorithms to the aerial imagery for 3D dune modeling.
• Assess mapping repeatability by analyzing the eight surveyed Ground Control Points (GCPs) distributed across the dune.
• Test land cover classification models on coastal dune imagery from the Dyfi National Nature Reserve.

Strengths

• Provides very high spatial detail with a ground pixel resolution of 0.01 meters.
• Imagery covers a discrete 8000 m² area of a coastal sand dune system.
• Collection utilized eight surveyed Ground Control Points (GCPs) for enhanced geospatial accuracy.
• Data was orthorectified and mosaicked using an automated Pix4Dmapper workflow.

Limitations

• Single temporal snapshot from one day in February 2020, limiting seasonal or change-over-time analysis.
• Geographic scope is limited to one specific dune system in Wales.
• The dataset's utility for machine learning may be constrained by the lack of provided pre-extracted feature columns or labels.

Provenance

Source

Environmental Information Data Centre; collected and processed by Dr Ryan Wilson and Dr Thomas Smyth (University of Huddersfield).

Collection Method

Collected via DJI Mavic Pro 2 UAV flight planned with Pix4DCapture; orthorectified and mosaicked using Pix4Dmapper with Structure-from-Motion algorithms.

Time Range

February 5,  2020.

Freshness

Data is from 2020; metadata was updated in March 2026.

Geography

Ynyslas coastal sand dunes, Dyfi National Nature Reserve, Wales.