Drone-Based Ground Penetrating Radar for Peat Soil Mapping
A cutting-edge drone-based Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) system (GeoDrone) enabled a time-efficient and repeatable mapping of peat soil thickness and to quantify the seasonal variability of biogenic gas content in the Everglades, Florida, USA, based on time-lapse measurements
The Challenge: Mapping Peat Soil with GPR
Peat soils found in wetlands are a critical component for our climate, as a natural producer of greenhouse gases (such as methane and carbon dioxide). Quantifying the amount of gas produced in, and released from the soil, is an important input for climate models. Wetlands are however often large and waterlogged, making accessibility a challenge for ground-based investigations.
This resulted in the use of a drone-based GPR solution to test its ability to map peat volume, and the implementation of time-lapse measurements to infer changes in volumetric gas content that can be used to infer gas production and fluxes.
The Solution: Using Drone-Based GPR for Mapping Peat Soil
The MALÅ GeoDrone 80 is a lightweight antenna, specifically developed for drone mounting. The centre frequency of 80 MHz enabled both the required depth of around 4 meters and provided a high enough resolution for mapping of the different geological units (water, peat and marl).
This approach was tested over two grids (of about 17,500 m2) in the Everglades, Florida, US, with a flightpath aided drone, complemented with ground-based GPR measurements as well as direct gas emission measurements.
Results and Conclusion
The results presented in this case shows that drone-based GPR measurements can:
- Efficiently characterize peat thickness in the Everglades.
- Estimate gas content within the peat column across in space and by time.
Read more about this in the full paper: https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JG008891
Three major benefits, with the use of drone-based GPR, were:
- The drone-based GPR approach is non-invasive, and therefore data collection is made without any disturbance to the gas regime in the peat soils, which may occur during traditional ground-base surveys.
- Drone-based GPR investigations are particularly suitable in rough and remote environments such as areas in the Everglades, where high water tables, dense vegetation, or threatening animals may pose a challenge for traditional gerund-based surveys.
- Drone-based GPR has the capacity to survey a larger area in a regular and repeatable pattern that reduces survey time. For this case the flight time for each grid was 17 minutes compared toa traditional ground surveys which would take several hours.
Top and Mid picture: Ground-based GPR profiles (GX450 and GX160). Bottom picture: Drone-based GPR Profile (GeoDrone 80). The cores show the interface water/peat (peat surface) and peat/marl. Depth scales for all transects are based on an average electromagnetic wave velocity of 0.038 m/ns.
Gas content distribution over time as averaged for the entire 1m peat column and inferred from drone-based time-lapse GPR measurements.
Project
Method: GPR
Solution: MALÅ GeoDrone 80
Processing and Visualization software: ReflexW for GPR data and Surfer for surface visualization.
More to read
Method: Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)
Instrument: MALÅ GeoDrone 80
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the following research institutes for sharing the information above:
- Department of Earth and Environment, Florida International University, USA
- Department of Geosciences, Florida Atlantic University, USA
- U.S. Geological Survey, New York Water Science Center, USA
- Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, USA
The full paper (Comas, X., Terry, N., Islam, M. R., Brodylo, D., & Zhang, C. (2025). Exploring the use of non‐invasive drone‐based ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) to characterize biogenic gas dynamics in subtropical peat soils. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences,130, e2025JG008891. is found here: https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JG008891
