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In addition to my day-to-day job, I also take on freelance projects in my spare time, as available.
Services
Services
Based in Anchorage, AK, I provide assorted services for science and conservation projects around Alaska and beyond. These include drone piloting and mission planning, study design and consultation, GIS mapping and spatial analysis, and coauthoring reports and scientific manuscripts—as well as more general expertise in field biology and scientific writing.
I am happy to provide free advice or paid consultation to help inform scientific studies, field plans, data workflows, and general drone operations. I can speak to experience with a variety of both paid and free & open source software options for processing drone data, and I am always willing to learn a new hardware or software system when I have the time. Please reach out to me at gregorydlarsen@gmail.com if you would like to discuss ideas.
Qualifications
Qualifications
First and foremost, I hold a PhD in Marine Science and Conservation from Duke University (2022), where I completed my dissertation research on drone applications for wildlife research with the Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab. I conducted my postdoctoral research with the Silman Lab at Wake Forest University, where I managed the lab's drone program and carried out scientific drone operations with private and NGO colleagues in the US and Peru.
Accordingly, I am a Part 107 FAA-certified certified scientific/commercial drone pilot, continuously certified and practicing scientific drone operations since 2017. To date I've piloted over 1100 flights for projects spanning coastal Alaska, Antarctica, the Peruvian Amazon, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and various other sites in North and South America. These projects have frequently entailed operating drones from boats and remote locations, including mutliple-day at-sea and wilderness excursions.
Past projects have included programmed, manual, and combined missions for topics including photogrammetry of whales and sharks, surveys of cliff-nesting seabirds and sea turtle nests, surveys of water quality and ocean color, wildlife surveys in thermal and color imagery, photogrammetric and structure-from-motion mapping (orthomosaics and digital surface models), LiDAR mapping and associated products (point clouds, surface models, terrain models, and canopy height models), and general aerial photography and cinematography.
The majority of my work and piloting experience has used multirotor platforms (quad- and hexacopters), but I have some experience piloting fixed-wing platforms, and I have assisted in operations using multiple VTOL/transitional fixed-wing platforms. I am generally happy to learn new systems as they enter mainstream use, though new models alway require a practice and familiarization period before safe operation in the field.
Relatedly, I have worked with systems from multiple manufacturers including many DJI drones (Phantom 4 Pro, assorted Mavic series models, Matrice 300) and payloads (L1, H20T, and assorted color cameras), but also drones from FoxTech, Freefly, 3D Robotics and payloads from Sony, Teledyne FLIR, and Micasense.
Beyond drones, I have used multiple survey-grade GNSS receivers (Trimble and Emlid systems) to ground-truth drone, satellite, and field datasets. For data processing, I have used Pix4D and Agisoft software systems and workflows, and I have coded assorted custom tools in Python, as projects have required.
In addition to drone data, I also work reguarly with aerial imagery from occupied aircraft and with satellite imagery of various scales and modalities, and I occasionally participate in peer reviews of grants and journal articles on these topics. I'm highly experienced with complex spatial analyses and proficient with a variety of GIS programs and data types, and I have worked with a variety of AI systems through my scientific career, including RetinaNet and Yolo architectures.
If you are interested in my work, consider checking out some of my recent and ongoing projects or past publications.
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