Biotic and abiotic stresses are key limiting factors in crop and animal production as well as in managed ecosystems. Characterizing plant and animal behavior in response to changing environmental conditions is a critical pursuit for researchers across the country, necessary for breeding and genetic improvement as well as for improving management practices to maximize resilience and productivity. Remote sensing with unoccupied/unmanned aerial systems (UAS, also referred to as drones) has recently demonstrated the ability to characterize crops, animals, forests, estuaries and their various stresses at much higher throughput than previously possible (Shi et al., 2016; Resop et al., 2019; Chandel et al., 2021). This capability will, for example, enable breeders to make rapid and robust selection decisions and farm managers to quickly respond to stresses with appropriate mitigation tactics. UAS can even potentially be used to effectuate those mitigation tactics by, for example, spot-applying input materials such as herbicides. However, UAS use in agriculture and natural resources is still at an early stage, and substantial development is needed for each situation and to enable routine use. 

While UAS data collection is becoming common in agronomic research, improvement is needed in the types of measurements, in the accuracy and repeatability of the measurements, and to enable positive impacts through knowledge and decision making. UAS has not yet taken hold in production agriculture, although many of the larger seed and agricultural companies have started to incorporate it in specific breeding and management tools. Early interest in agricultural UAS resulted in substantial and growing financial investment in UAS startups (over $700M by 2017), with over $200M invested in 2017 alone (Davis, 2017). Over a five-year period from 2012 to 2017, investments in agricultural technology including UAS increased by 80% annually (Walker et al., 2016). A wide range of UAS platforms and sensors is now available in the marketplace, but UAS have yet to directly enhance profitability in agriculture. A recent survey indicated that only 25% of agricultural service dealers who offer UAS services were seeing a positive return on investment (Erickson and Lowenberg-DeBoer, 2020). The value of UAS in production agriculture will remain low until research can clearly demonstrate reliable systems and workflows that provide return on investment. A major difficulty is that agricultural systems are extremely complex, with many potential stressors that can appear simultaneously, and their measurable symptoms are often indistinguishable. On the other hand, most published UAS research has focused on proving an application in single fields, single crops, and single physiological phenotypes or stresses; it has thus been far from having comprehensive appeal. Methods that have broad applicability across multiple fields, crops, times, and regions are essential to exploiting the benefits of UAS in production agriculture. 

Another large gap is in education on UAS usage, both in classroom and extension environments. Such education is needed not only by those in farming enterprises but also by researchers and crop consultants who interact with them. In a recent survey of over 13,000 members (2,181 responding) of Certified Crop Advisors (2020), only 43% are comfortable using UAS for remote sensing. It is telling that 38% are not yet using aerial imagery, while 16% are using such imagery more than once per week. This large disparity could be alleviated with educational programming. When respondents were asked what type of education they would like more of, the top answers were prescription field management (63%), remote sensing (56%), use of on farm sensors (50%), and UAVs (33%). 

Researchers at individual universities often lack sufficient crop diversity and geographic variability to adequately demonstrate broad UAS utility. Furthermore, their limited resources reinforce such a restricted focus. Therefore, a formal mechanism for communication and collaboration is necessary to facilitate the multi-institutional activities in UAS needed to adequately support the Land Grant missions of research, education and extension across the US. With a community built from a multistate approach, we expect to more rapidly advance UAS applications and practices and clearly demonstrate their benefits.