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DRONES will revolutionise ecological monitoring, says Monash University researchers, being both more accurate and convenient compared to traditional ground counts.
Ecologists are using drones to carry out tasks like monitoring the size of seabird colonies in tropical and polar environments.
As drone technology improves, their ever-increasing precision, and their ability to reach and survey hard-to-reach populations will become even more attractive, allowing wildlife monitoring project to to move from using traditional surveying methods to drone technology.
Monash ecologist Dr Rohan Clarke explained that drones have already been used to monitor everything from the breeding success of canopy-nesting birds and to surveying elephants. The scientists, however, wanted to test if this method was better than more traditional survey techniques.
“Until now, it has been unclear as to how precise drone technology might be when monitoring the size of populations of wildlife. Our latest research has demonstrated that a very high degree of precision can be achieved when using drone technology to monitor wildlife,” Dr Clarke said.
The researchers compared the precision of drone-derived image counts with those made at the same time by human counters on the ground for colonies of three types of seabird: They also monitored for signs that the birds might be startled by the presence of a drone.
The authors found that counts using images captured by drones did not startle the birds and were consistently more similar than those taken from the ground. Additionally, a drone suspended in the air with its cameras pointing straight down is likely to have a better view of the entire population of a colony, whereas when counting from the ground, the terrain and other birds obscure the counters’ line of sight.