A cost benefit analysis was completed to evaluate two potential management options that incorporate drones into the Conservancy’s tamarisk monitoring activities:
The Conservancy contracts a drone service to conduct flights over the property, or
The Conservancy purchases a drone and all related accessories and permitting.
Information about the costs for each option was collected and summed over a five-year period. We chose this short period in recognition of the rapid evolution of drone technology, as the cost of commercially available drones and drone-related services will decrease over time. The benefits of drone technology were quantified in terms of wage-hour time savings, or the amount of money that would be saved because substituting drones for on-the-ground monitoring would result in less staff time in the field.
The results are displayed above as a ratio of the total benefits divided by the total costs of implementation. The drone purchase (Option 2) is the more favorable option because the ratio is greater than 1, meaning that benefits outweigh costs. Although this option is only slightly more favorable than the status quo of current monitoring strategies, this analysis was limited to the benefits of using drones for monitoring weeds, so it is reasonable to assume that if benefits were expanded to include all Conservancy activities, the overall benefits of a drone purchase would only increase while costs remain relatively static.