Precision wildlife monitoring using unmanned aerial vehicles

By Jarrod C. Hodgson, Shane Baylis, Rowan Mott, A. Herrod, R. Clarke. Scientific Reports, 2016

434 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a new frontier in environmental research. Their use has the potential to revolutionise the field if they prove capable of improving data quality or the ease with which data are collected beyond traditional methods. We apply UAV technology to wildlife monitoring in tropical and polar environments and demonstrate that UAV-derived counts of colony nesting birds are an order of magnitude more precise than traditional ground counts. The increased count precision afforded by UAVs, along with their ability to survey hard-to-reach populations and places, will likely drive many wildlife monitoring projects that rely on population counts to transition from traditional methods to UAV technology. Careful consideration will be required to ensure the coherence of historic data sets with new UAV-derived data and we propose a method for determining the number of duplicated (concurrent UAV and ground counts) sampling points needed to achieve data compatibility.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/842620444bb8b4781aa98d66dd46912425ca8a46

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Citations in the corpus

Drones count wildlife more accurately and precisely than humans (2017, methodology): “Pre-registered analyses were designed to investigate how within-colony absolute count error, within-colony variability of counts, and within-colony bias of counts differed between count techniques (Hodgson et al. 2016b).”
Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation (2021, background): “• Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones for lowaltitude image-based approaches, have been highlighted as a promising technology for animal conservation (77, 78).”
The potential for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct marine fauna surveys in place of manned aircraft (2018, background): “Multirotor UAVs are a comparatively new technology and have only appeared in the marine literature in the last few years (Durban et al., 2015; Goebel et al., 2015; Hodgson et al., 2016; Sweeney et al., 2016).”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environmental biology: a review (2019, background): “In contrast, counting of Fregata ariel (frigate bird), Thalasseus bergii (crested tern) and Eudyptes schlegeli (royal penguin) individuals in different environments (polar and tropical) based on UAV imagery was more accurate than ground observation counting (Hodgson et al. 2016).”