Appropriate Mini UAV Technology for Micro-Watershed Land-Use Management Toward a Sustainable Future

Micro-watersheds, defined as first-order drainage units under 5 km, provide a spatially coherent context for localized land-use (LU) and hydrological management. Their smaller scale and homogeneous LU patterns enable more targeted interventions compared to larger watersheds, which often span multiple governance units and present complex hydrological hierarchies. The adoption of UAV-based sensing technologies has significantly enhanced the quality and resolution of spatial inputs required for micro-watershed assessments, particularly for mapping terrain variability, monitoring vegetation stress, and detecting thermal hot spots. Recent studies have shown that UAV-derived datasets, including DEMs, NDVI, soil moisture indices, and land surface temperature (LST), can substantially improve the representation of biophysical processes in hydrological and spatial models. However, to optimize operational efficiency, careful consideration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) type, payload ratio, and power supply mechanisms is required, particularly in rugged terrain. Alternative and complementary data sources, such as high-resolution satellite imagery, LiDAR, and participatory monitoring, can further improve the accuracy of LU classification and change detection. Advanced modeling approaches, including physics-informed machine learning and graph-based methods, enable the integration of these high-resolution UAV datasets with fundamental hydrological principles, thereby strengthening predictive capacity for environmental planning and climate-resilient LU management. Overall, UAV-based micro-watershed assessment offers an innovative pathway for sustainable land and water resource management, allowing the identification of critical areas such as erosion-prone zones, thermal stress hot spots, and water-limited subcatchments, and supporting evidence-based decision-making at the local scale.