The combination of unmanned aerial vehicles and chromatographic techniques for advancing environmental analysis: a review

Environmental pollution and the enforcement of regulatory threshold values are among today’s most pressing challenges, driving the growing demand for advanced environmental monitoring. Chromatographic techniques play a central role in this effort, as they enable comprehensive monitoring of pollutants in air and water samples. In particular, both gas and liquid chromatography, coupled with diverse detection systems, provide highly efficient tools for detailed sample characterization. Accurate assessment of environmental pollutants requires minimizing sampling bias, which is often introduced during sample collection. This can be achieved by sampling as close as possible to the emission source, creating a need for remote controlled and flexible sampling systems. At the same time, monitoring in remote or hazardous environments must be conducted without exposing personnel to risk. During the last few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones equipped with specialized sampling devices have revolutionized environmental monitoring. They enable efficient and safe collection of air and water samples from otherwise inaccessible or dangerous locations, making analyses possible where conventional sampling cannot be performed. Although several review articles have addressed the integration of sensors into UAVs, their use for sample collection prior to chromatographic analysis has received comparatively little attention. Thus, this review examines the integration of drone-based sampling with modern chromatographic techniques. It evaluates various air and water sampling systems as front-end tools to gas and liquid chromatography, with the aim of improving the detection and monitoring of diverse environmental pollutants. The integration of greener and more sustainable approaches in drones (i.e., solid-phase microextraction) is also discussed.