Forget delivering packages or
taking aerial photographs — drones
can even count small birds!
A new study, published in The
Auk: Ornithological Advances, tests this new approach to wildlife monitoring
and concludes that, despite some drawbacks, the method has the potential to
become an important tool for ecologists and land managers.
Bird surveys provide crucial data
for environmental management but they have limitations: some areas are
difficult to access and surveyors vary in their skills at identifying birds.
Using audio recordings made by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can help to
combat both of these pitfalls, as hard-to-reach sites can be flown over and
multiple people can review the resulting recordings.
Andrew Wilson of Gettysburg
College and his colleagues tested the feasibility of this approach by using
fishing line to suspend an audio recorder from a simple drone, first in trial
runs on college athletic fields and then in real bird surveys on Pennsylvania
State Game Lands, USA.
The field experiments on state
game lands directly compared UAV data with traditional ground-based surveys of
the same areas. A few bird species were undercounted by the UAV technique, such
as Mourning
Doves — which have extremely
low-frequency calls that weren't picked up by the recorder — and Grey
Catbirds, which occurred at such high densities that counting
individual birds in the recordings was difficult. Overall, however, there were
few significant differences between the results produced by the two methods.
No comments:
Post a Comment