Locating, IDing and Counting Marine Megafauna with Drones #drone #droneday
From NC State News:
“Demonstrating the viability of drones for this work matters, because these are inexpensive tools for collecting accurate abundance estimates,” Hensel says. “And those estimates are important for both informing the development of conservation efforts and for assessing the effectiveness of those efforts.
“Drone surveys are also a good way to monitor shallow water, megafauna species because they are not intrusive,” Hensel says. “More traditional monitoring methods – such as boat surveys or gill nets – are more invasive, and have the potential to harm individuals or alter their movement patterns.”
Previous studies using drones to monitor marine species have focused on single sites. The recent work from NC State evaluated multiple sites, demonstrating that drones can be used to assess environmental variables that may be responsible for population differences between locations. For example, drones may be used to help target conservation efforts on sites that have the most value in terms of supporting specific species.
Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.