UAV technology is evolving fast as the potential continues to be realized. Drones have utility for monitoring smaller areas and as an excellent field sampling tool for larger mapping programs. Satellite imagery provides the ability to monitor land-cover at national or continental scale to calculate land-cover change rates, while a UAV can intensively target smaller areas in a statistically random fashion using probability sampling to provide estimates based on extremely high resolution aerial photography data.

Lidar drones are also used to collect high resolution data to calculate structural information about different land-cover types. I have experience collecting lidar data with a Matrice 600 w/ Riegl MiniVux 1-UAV payload in Senegal, The Republic of Congo and the USA. I have experience using smaller drones to create ortho photos for monitoring in New Zealand and the USA.

While we cannot cover a whole country using lidar drones easily or cheaply, we can leverage probability sampling to provide area estimates at sub-meter resolution. I can advise on the feasibility of building a system such as this over any given area from scratch, and then work with you to build it.