The use of aerial imagery for institutional asset tracking is older and much more widespread than we'd think. Back in 2005/2006 my university maths professor (

The use of aerial imagery for institutional asset tracking is older and much more widespread than we'd think. Back in 2005/2006 my university maths professor (in Finland) had an established side gig in the US. He had polished a process to manufacture aerial drones - still called UAVs at the time - and had put together a fairly slick software pipeline to combine GPS tracking with digital imagery. One of his longer-term clients at the time was Harvard University; they had contracted his firm to get routine data on how their land endowments were doing. An associate professor at the CS department has had a similar thing going on since ~2005. His company does drone imagery for land owners in Finland. Rather surprisingly a notable fraction of his business at the time was coming in from families and corporate offices wanting "just" nice looking shots of their various farm buildings. At the time the university in question was rather well known for their computer vision unit.