vances in UAV technology. ‘I think the UAV of choice [when it comes to biodiversity] will
be a rotary machine that can take off vertically and then go straight like a fixed-wing, in
other words have folding wings on it. That’s going to be the ideal UAV for wildlife and
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biodiversity studies in the future. Because you can take off anywhere you want and land
anywhere you want within reason. And it will be even better if it has pontoons on it so it
can land on the water. There are people working on that right now, but it’s not yet perfected’.
The use of UAVs for conservation is becoming an increasingly promising field. As UAV
technology continues to expand, so do the possibilities for conservation research. Moving forward, Conservation Drones are hoping to use their UAV to track animals. Serge
Wich has highlighted the logistics of such work, commenting that ‘lots of animals from
different species have VHF telemetry systems on them, meaning they have a very simple
radio on them that emits signals. People usually go on the ground with large antennas
to locate these animals by triangulation and it would be much easier if we could fly over
these areas and locate them from the air. This is something we are trying to develop with
several teams. For instance, orang-utans that we reintroduce get one of these tags and
when they move away from the area where we released them they go further than we
can walk and we can lose them. We don’t know where they are. Are they alive? Are they
dead? Are they near a village? And if we could just fly over these areas and locate them, it
would be very useful because every animal has a unique frequency so you could say “Oh
Johnny is there”’. David Bird is also eager to see UAVs used for animal tracking, nothing
that these machines can ‘be an antenna in the sky and pick up radio signals from animals
telling you the animal is nearby. It is something we are hoping to do but we’re not quite
there yet. We want to be able to not only pick signals up but send it back down to the
ground. It is another holy grail we are working on’. Further down the line, the next challenge for advancing the role that UAVs can play to conservation is achieving automatic
object detection. Automatic object detection is software that can automatically identify animals or poachers. This would enable tasks such as counting animals to become
completely automated. Whilst still some way off, developing autonomous software for
UAVs is a rapidly advancing field and is certainly a key area to watch within conservation
research.
By Megan Roden & Jemima Khalli
@Skytechevent
#Skytech #UAV #Drones