Eye in the sky
Game changers for conservationists, drones are fast becoming a welcome addition to researchers’ toolkits.
Game changers for conservationists, drones are fast becoming a welcome addition to researchers’ toolkits.
MONITORINGWILDLIFE populations is no easy task. For researchers on Macquarie Island, located about halfway between Australia and Antarctica, estimating wildlife numbers traditionally involves teams of professional counters and volunteers manually picking their way around the island and tallying individuals with hand-held clickers.This is an arduous process. However, scientists are beginning to turn to drones to help streamline conservation activities, including wildlife counts.
Drones are lightweight ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’, or UAVs, controlled remotely. They can be used to take high-resolution images and video footage of landscapes, offering scientists bird’s-eye views.Analysing drone images allows researchers to cost-effectively survey wildlife, map terrain and monitor ecosystems.
At the forefront of drone innovation is ecologist Dr Lian Pin Koh, from the University of Adelaide. In 2012 Lian Pin co-founded Conservation Drones, a US-based not-for-profit organisation that develops conservation-related applications for drones. Today, he operates a ‘drone-hub’ from Adelaide, employing six pilots to control a fleet of 15 drones. “One day, [drones] will be as common as binoculars in a biologist’s toolkit,” he says.
Lian Pin and his team at the University of Adelaide are working on projects as diverse as looking for burrowing bettong habitat in remote South Australia; working with agricultural scientists to examine crops for signs of disease; working with SA Water to trial using drones to inspect remote water towers; and collaborating with ecologists to change the way researchers monitor and survey wildlife.
Traditionally, researchers use two main methods to count wildlife.They either examine images taken from planes and helicopters or tally numbers gathered during ground counts, which involve teams of people observing animals and documenting the results. These methods are expensive, time-consuming and labourintensive. They can also be noisy and disruptive. In comparison, drones are small, quiet and affordable, costing between $850 and $20,000 each.
Jarrod Hodgson, an ecologist formerly with Monash University in Melbourne, completed a trial of drones for wildlife monitoring on Macquarie Island in 2014–15. He and a team of researchers from Monash also employed drones to monitor colonies of lesser fr igate birds and greater crested terns on Ashmore Reef, some 350km off the Kimberley coast in Western Australia, in 2014.
Jarrod then compared the bird numbers researchers counted using drone images with the numbers ground counters collected.“We purposely used very experienced people,” Jarrod says. “Out of anyone, they’re probably going to have the most accurate estimates, but obviously it’s a hard thing when you’re
trying to count an aggregate of animals and you don’t actually know the true number.” Using the drone images, counters identified more birds and there was less discrepancy between the figures different counters tallied. This suggests drone counts could be more cost-effective, and more precise.
According to Lian Pin, population monitoring could become even easier as technology advances and computers analyse drone images using algorithms.As much as these innovations excite Lian Pin, what really inspires him is that drones enable a diversity of conservation activities – thanks to their low cost.
Lian Pin co-founded Conservation Drones to help track endangered orangutans and monitor illegal logging for palm oil plantations in remote Indonesian national parks.The rapid destruction of these forests has reduced orangutan numbers by an estimated 80 per cent during the past 75 years. Drones have allowed researchers to produce up-to-date data on land clearing in the region, which is helping law enforcers stop illegal activity. Conservation Drones runs similar projects all over the world, from Tanzania, Nepal and Panama, to Scotland, Malaysia and Madagascar.
Lian Pin credits a large international hobbyist movement with many of the most useful breakthroughs in drone software and hardware, particularly battery life (still the single most significant restriction on what drones can do). Innovation, he explains, was initially driven by amateurs on sites such as DIYdrones.com; however, drones are rapidly becoming big business and larger-scale support is growing.
A prominent backer is Chris Anderson, former editor of US tech magazine Wired. Chris co-founded drone company 3D Robotics in 2012.The company, which has quickly grown to become the largest commercial drone manufacturer in the USA, provides cutting-edge software and hardware to Lian Pin and other wildlife researchers around the world.
While this is all fantastic, Jarrod acknowledges that before drones become a staple for scientists, researchers need to make sure animals aren’t being harmed by an increasing swarm of remote-controlled research aids. The effects on a penguin or tern might not be obvious, he says, so researchers will have to tease out the subtleties. “A bird might still sit on its nest, but that could be because it’s trying to defend it,” he explains.“It still could be quite stressed.”
Jarrod, now based at the University of Adelaide, plans to use tools such as fake eggs fitted with heartrate monitors to measure these types of wildlife responses. “We’re keen to try and quantify that kind of disturbance so we can make protocols around it,” he says. Jarrod hopes this research will also increase public awareness and inform legislation for recreational drone use,“so that people don’t just take drones down to a beach or a national park and disturb lots of wildlife unintentionally”.