Before every flight, the same routine unfolds: batteries are checked, weather conditions are reviewed, flight plans are verified, and the survey area is defined. For those who work with drones, these are familiar procedures, yet they are essential for collecting data, monitoring ecosystems, producing high-resolution maps, and ensuring safe operations.
Everything is ready on the ground, and the landscape appears familiar.
Then the drone takes off.
Within just a few metres of altitude, something begins to change. Not the landscape itself, but the way we see it.
What only moments before seemed ordinary starts to transform. Footpaths become delicate lines, forests reveal unexpected geometries, and traces left by water, wind, or human activity emerge with a clarity impossible to grasp from the ground. Shapes become sharper, relationships between elements more apparent, and details begin to organize themselves into larger patterns. It is as though the landscape starts telling a different story, one that remains largely invisible from below.
For researchers at CIMA Research Foundation, drones are first and foremost scientific tools. They are used to monitor ecosystems, document changes in the land surface, produce high-resolution mapping products, support civil protection activities, and gather critical information for understanding complex natural processes.
The images captured during these missions are not created as artistic photographs.
They are created to measure.
Every pixel contains information, and every image contributes to models, analyses, and scientific knowledge. Through these data, researchers can track vegetation dynamics, monitor coastal erosion, analyse the impacts of flooding, or assess the consequences of wildfires.
And yet, in day-to-day operations, something unexpected often happens.
When data becomes imagery
Looking down from above, researchers often find themselves confronted with scenes that seem to belong to a different language altogether. The curves traced by a river resemble brushstrokes on a canvas; tree canopies become intricate textures; beaches turn into abstract fields of colour; and sediments carried by currents form compositions that appear almost intentionally designed.
The same image can be read in different ways.
It is not the landscape that changes, but the way we look at it.
From a scientific perspective, an image is a collection of information to be interpreted, data that help explain a phenomenon. From an observational perspective, it becomes a visual narrative made of shapes, textures, colours, and impressions. These are not competing viewpoints but complementary ones, coexisting within the same gaze in a continuous dialogue between science and art.
It is precisely in this space where knowledge meets perception that Dronographies was born, the Arte & Scienza project that brings together a selection of images captured during the Foundation’s scientific and operational activities.
Photographs created to observe the landscape, which ultimately end up telling its story.
Waiting for the Tide
When art and science share the same view
Looking at these images, it becomes clear that a drone is more than a technological tool. It is also a means of changing perspective. And changing perspective often means changing understanding.
Many of the phenomena studied by researchers unfold across spatial scales that are difficult to grasp from the ground. Water slowly reshaping the landscape, vegetation responding to climatic variations, or transformations driven by extreme events all leave behind patterns and spatial relationships that only become visible when the territory is observed as a whole. From above, what appears uniform reveals subtle differences; ecosystems expose their internal structure; and the consequences of natural processes emerge in their full complexity.
This is why every mission is also an exercise in reading the landscape.
Drones take research teams into remarkably diverse environments, from remote natural areas where human presence is barely visible to territories affected by wildfires, floods, and other events that have profoundly altered landscapes and infrastructure. Their applications extend from monitoring Alpine glaciers and observing cetaceans in the Mediterranean to surveying protected natural habitats and supporting wildfire prevention and management activities, as highlighted in the Foundation’s 2025 Annual Report.
Every environment demands attention, not only from a technical standpoint but also in the ability to recognize the traces, patterns, and relationships that the landscape reveals. Often, it is the unexpected details that capture the eye: elements that carry precise scientific meaning while also possessing a striking visual power.
There is something unique about working with these tools. The ability to observe carefully lies at the heart of both scientific research and photography. Both require us to pause, to look, and to question what lies before us. On one side is the rigour of measurement; on the other, the wonder of discovery. Far from being opposites, these two dimensions coexist and enrich one another.
The images collected during these missions therefore serve a dual purpose: they are instruments of knowledge for research and opportunities for discovery for those who observe them.
Because science is not only a way of understanding the world. Sometimes, it is also what allows us to perceive connections, forms, and transformations that would otherwise remain unseen.
And it is precisely from this encounter between knowledge and wonder that the images of Dronographies emerge: a view from above of a landscape that still has many stories left to tell.