Advances in sensor technology and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have created the opportunity for low cost aerial monitoring. As much of this development is not tailored for remote sensing applications, a custom built UAS was used to test the feasibility of inexpensive monitoring over forested and farmland case studies. This system flew autonomously at 50 m altitude above ground level, to create visual wavelength maps with 3 cm resolution and better than 5 m horizontal accuracy. Images were collected with 2 m spot size point spectrometer readings at 4 Hz, for identification of specific compounds. In test runs, approximately 15 acres were surveyed in just over 9 minutes. Methods developed can be applied to industrial monitoring applications such as tailings pond surface moisture content estimation and petroleum leak detection for pipelines.