Abstract

The rapid development of technologies in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has led to their use in various areas. UAVs are mainly used for commercial purposes, but their utilization is increasingly important in other areas because their operation cost is less than satellites and aerial imaging. The utilization of UAVs in the environment/ecology area is relatively new. Therefore, identifying the trends of UAV-related spatial information is significant in basic research for UAV utilization. This study quantitatively identified domestic and international research trends related to UAV utilization and analyzed research areas. An attempt was also made to identify upcoming UAV-related topics in the environment/ecology research field using text mining to analyze the bibliographic information of global research literature. Domestic UAV-related studies were classified into seven clusters where basic research on “UAV technology/industry trends” was abundant, and studies on data collection and analysis through UAV remote sensing technology have increased since 2015. Eight clusters were identified for international studies where the most active research area international was “remote sensing technology/data analysis”. In addition, Canopy, Classification, Forest, Leaf Area Index, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, Temperature, Tree, and Atmosphere appeared as the main keywords related to environment and ecology. The appearance frequencies and association strengths were high because the advancement in UAV optical sensor technology and the rapid development of image processing technology enabled the acquisition of data that could not be obtained from existing spatial information. They are recognized as future research topics as related domestic studies have begun corresponding to international research.