The Duke University Robotics team, Maddie Hayes and Dr. Justin Ridge (Duke University Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab) produced the video of Alligator Harbor below using a drone capable of 3D scanning.  A great benefit of this technology is that it produces incredible aerial fly-through videos from the color 3D point clouds (which are thousands of georeferenced data points in space -- here, 21 million points over ~31 acres). The point clouds allow scientists to create digital surface/elevation models that can then be used to analyze the morphological structure of these habitats. To create the video, Dr. Ridge used Pix4D photogrammetry software, which overlaps images from multiple angles to reconstruct the subject (in this case, the Alligator Harbor oyster reefs and marsh) in a process called Structure from Motion (SfM). Here, the smooth grey areas are oyster reefs and the greenish-grey areas are marsh vegetation. We will use these data to determine reef heights, reef volumes, and densities of live oyster clusters. The point cloud can be imported into ArcGIS and similar programs for detailed analysis.