Assessing the Potential of Drones to Take Water Samples and Physicochemical Data from Open Lakes

摘要: 1.1 BackgroundThe introduction of the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD)(2000/60/EC) in 2000, and its subsequent adaptation into Irish law in 2003, saw a Europe-wide approach to surface water and groundwater conservation and management. The key aim of the WFD is to ensure the good ecological status of all European waters. For inclusion in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) WFD Lake Monitoring Programme, lakes must have a surface area greater than 50 ha, be an active source of drinking water or be protected under other EU legislation such as the Habitats or Birds Directive (Tierney et al., 2015; O’Boyle et al., 2019). To date, 812 Irish lakes are classified as WFD water bodies, of which a subset of 215 representative lakes were monitored during 2013–2018 (O’Boyle et al., 2019). For the remaining (approximately) 597 unmonitored lakes, many of which are remote or have limited access, efforts have been made to extrapolate ecological status using land use and hydrogeomorphology data from monitored lakes (Wynne and Donohue, 2016) and using macrophyte remote-sensing data captured from Sentinel-2 data