It would still be necessary to visit the sites in person, but it seems to me that using lidar would be a lot more effective and tons quicker than risking life and not covering much ground at any one time, particularly given the size of the territory to be searched.
Agreed. All they accomplished was wasting research $$.
Ironically, I was positing the use of LIDAR for such research before the equipment was even small enough for a Cessna; in this era, there's no excuse whatsoever for a researcher not to use a LIDAR/GPR drone to narrow down a target area for hand search with limited resources...