In the context of climate change, changing environmental conditions and increasing as well as conflicting demands on land use, environmental monitoring is of great importance at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. The main objective of this project is the development of a Remote Sensing Monitoring Competence Center at ZHAW’s Institute of Natural Resource Sciences. An extensive database was collected in numerous pilot studies that i.) allows for detailed analyses of potential applications and limitations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in environmental monitoring, and ii.) provides a solid basis for further research. Several GIS analysis sequences and custom build GIS tools for (semi-) automated and user-friendly analysis of high-resolution close-range remote sensing data were developed and validated.