A dune remobilization project has recently been undertaken by Natural Resources Wales (NRW) and is believed to be the largest project of its kind in the United Kingdom. The project commenced in January 2015 and involved the removal of large quantities of sand, vegetation and organic material via a series of cut ‘notches’ to the west facing front end of well-established, over-vegetated aeolian sand dunes at a site near Newborough on Anglesey in North Wales. The primary works involved the mechanical excavation of material from strategic positions along the dune front to enhance sand mobilisation from the beach area through the main dune wall and into the dune slacks to the rear of the system in anticipation that this would encourage the reinvigoration of species normally found in a mobile dune ecosystem.

The project area surveyed for this work forms part of the larger dune system and conifer forest which is located to the south west of Anglesey in North Wales.

The aerial images for the photogrammetry process were captured by DTM Technologies using a small UAV (drone). A total of 363 images, 4000×3000 pixels were captured from an altitude of 60 metres, each image had a 65% overlap. They were flown manually in as close a ‘lawnmower’ pattern as possible with data processed using ‘off-the-shelf’ software. The output from this process was a high resolution point cloud, with a point density of 41 points/m² and an ortho mosaic image with a resolution of 3cms/pixel and a digital surface model with a sample spacing of 15cms. The survey process took approximately 5 hours, which included the terrestrial survey with data processing taking a further 12 hours. All files were exported as geo-referenced to British Grid OSGB36.