Use of drones for research and conservation of birds of prey

NEGRO, JUAN J.; CANAL, DAVID

In Birds of prey - Biology and conservation in the XXI century

Springer

Año: 2018; p. 325 - 338

In the last two decades, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) have experienced anexponential development. Originally conceived for military use, technologicaladvances and a dramatic reduction of prices are leading to widespread use of UASsin environmental disciplines including remote sensing, ecology, wildlife managementor environmental monitoring (Chabot and Bird 2015; Linchant et al. 2015;Christie et al. 2016).UASs have been used in wildlife management and conservation, among others,to monitor terrestrial (e.g. chimpanzees (van Andel et al. 2015), elephants and rhinoceroses(Vermeulen et al. 2013), ungulates (Barasona et al. 2014), black bears(Ditmer et al. 2015)) and marine mammals (e.g. dugongs (Hodgson et al. 2013),whales (Koski et al. 2015)) and birds (e.g. raptors (Canal et al. 2016; Junda et al.2016), bird colonies (Sardá-Palomera et al. 2012; Rümmler et al. 2015; Sardà-Palomeraet al. 2017)), as an antipoaching tool (Mulero-Pázmány et al. 2014b) andfor tracking tagged wildlife (Cliff et al. 2015; Dos Santos et al. 2015). In the field ofagriculture and the environment, the development of UAS has been so revolutionarythat different reviews are already available on particular applications (e.g. see Zhangand Kovacs 2012; Colomina and Molina 2014; Shahbazi et al. 2014 and referencestherein).