Hi everyone! Welcome to our drones virtual meetup. As always, use the chat to say hello and introduce yourself, where you’re from and a bit about your work or why you’re interested in the topic.

Hi everyone, my name is Lenny, I am calling from Tasmania and for my PhD, I am using drone based LiDAR to look at the relationship between forest structure and biodiversity.

Hi I´m Robin (www.capreolus.at) working with wildlife related projects mainly in Austria and Germany. I use UAVs to monitor beaver and wild boar damages (automatic detection and measurment) and try counting roe deer.

Hi all. I'm a PhD student from the University of Sheffield (with the Macaw Recovery Network & Chester Zoo) studying the ecology of the Great-Green macaw in Costa Rica. I am interested in using drones to survey for nest-sites in emergent trees, to help with a study into nest-site selection.

Hi all, I'm Kas. Just finished up a PhD on leopard ecology and conservation, and generally just interested in wildlife tech.

Hi! My name is Éadin (pronounced Aid-een, it’s Irish). I’m from Ireland, and work for the North Coast Cetacean Society (bcwhales.org) in Gitga’at native territory, British Columbia, Canada. I’ve just finished up 6 months of field work out there, flying drones using LiDAR and collecting blow samples from fin whales and humpbacks for my Masters. I’ll be developing the drone work on behalf of the organization and am excited to learn more from this webinar!

Hi everyone, I'm Calin from WWF Romania, and I recently started to use a drone for wildlife monitoring so I am very interested by the subject.

Hi, I'm Richard from CASA at University College London. We used drones to map Lima and also run education projects with kids

Hi all, thanks for joining! If you’re having any technical difficulties please feel free to message me privately as well.

Hi everyone, I'm Alejandro Tello, a hydrogeologist and photographer with a vast experience in drones, from Spain now based in Lima.

Hello, I am Sydney and I am a masters student at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. My research involves using drones to monitor tree health and take samples from the tree canopy.

Hi all, Im Langeni Mathew, GIS Specialist, WWF-Tanzania, Support all programmes

Hi all, I´m Mariella Leo, a biologist from Perú. Now in the city of Chachapoyas

Hi all, I'm Chris, a Ecologist from the UK, working in New Mexico and Sumatra on vegetation regrowth

Hi, All- Dan from Cellular Tracking Technologies. We are experimenting with our radio telemetry system, LifeTag, on drones.

Hi I’m Mazidi from WWF-Malaysia, based in Borneo. I operate conservation drone for the organisation for various conservation activities including orang-utan conservation, wildlife monitoring and enforcement, aerial mapping and habitat restoration.

David Lang (OpenROV) spoke at our open source meetup last season.

https://www.wildlabs.net/resources/community-announcements/wildlabs-virtual-meetup-recording-low-cost-open-source-solutions

HI, I’m Lot Amorós, founder of the project Dronecoria I developed an open source drone for aerial restoration with aerial sowing after wildfires.

http://dronecoria.org

Hi, I'm Thom Starnes, Senior GIS Analyst with RSPB (Birdlife in the UK). We areusing drone imagery to create aerial surveys for our 200 reserves and produced the Drones for GIS Best Practice document on WILDLABS Drones group https://www.wildlabs.net/community/thread/473. Great to be here.

Hi I’m Zoe Jewell from WildTrack, a non-profit focusing on non-invasive wildlife monitoring. We have been using drones for local reconnaissance in Africa to find animal trails, and are interested in developing AI to have a drone identify trails and follow them.

There are regulations in Zambia. Our drones project was used by the Zambia Civil Aviation Authority to implement and refine the governments regulation around drones which as well includes regulations to fly beyond visual line of sight. search for the "ZCAR part 18"

I think it might be worth starting a separate discussion about regulations on WILDLABS - the questions we had coming back we rather specific (e.g. ‘FAA requirement, Part 107?’)

flying beyond visual line is not possible in Austria.

This is my favourite slide to date.

Robin, same case in Spain. you are not allowed to fly a drone beyond the visual line

Is the machine-learning thermal IDing live on the drone flight itself, or post-processing?

Thanks for the talk!

Nice work Claire! Did you also work in Nepal? I think I saw it on the map. This would be a great tool to do mega fauna census.

sure

I have a question

yea please go ahead

awesome work

Hi, may you comment on yor AAF project in Perú?

cool

Do you have experience in finding deer fawns in Meadows?

Can you explain what you mean by thermal profile? These look like single channel images. How do you extract thermal profiles?

Here’s that Orangutan Nest Watch: https://www.wildlabs.net/resources/case-studies/drones-orangutans-and-strangler-figs-malaysian-borneo

And Sol’s profile: https://www.wildlabs.net/users/sol-milne

Fantastic presentation Claire! I wonder are you doing any development with multispectral / hyperspectral?

@Ned convolutional neural networks can learn patterns in single channel images. I think that might be how they do it.

Replying to Ned andJoanna…The thermal profile is essentially the pattern of warmer and cooler spots on the body of animals. Whilst the absolute temperatures of these vary from animal to animal the pattern is quite consistent for each species. The images I showed are radiometric - so temperatures are real, but for ML we convert these to single channel RGB where temperature maps to the colour values

Thanks - that makes sense. When you contrasted shape and thermal profile I was thinking you were recording multiple wavelengths

Thanks Claire

The hyper/mutli spec work is for detecting chemicals in the environment, e.g. from disused mining sites. We couldn’t afford to but one ourselves, but we’ve been using the same tech in astro for centuries to determine the composition of stars. So I wondered if we could build our own, starting with the physics and focus on detecting the specific things we were interested in. I have a Phd student working on it now and so far things are progressing well

@eadin - just had a thought. If you haven’t already, you might chat to the Duke Marine UAS team, they’re doing so much work with marine mammal monitoring + drones. They might have some experience to share if you’re not in touch already?

https://twitter.com/MarineUAS

Do you work with the local authorities in Madagascar on developing drone regulation and infrastructure etc?

Here’s the group Steph just mentioned: https://werobotics.org/flying-labs/

@Stephanie I’ve not been in touch with those guys, I’ll definitely follow that up! Thank you!

Are there ideas to join data like in the camera trapping community?

Just like: https://www.wildlifeinsights.org/

.

Great point robin.

Will throw it in there.

The link to that paper would be fantastic please!

We will track it down!

Thank you!

Our notes + recording will capture all of this info

Thank Claire can you share you paper on how to get started with thermal cameras on drones

Have you seen OpenAerialMap? https://openaerialmap.org/

Upload all of your RGB (and maybe thermal?) imagery, view on global map and digitise into OpenStreetMap

Thanks for the info Thomas!

+1 to this questions!

Here’s that paper from Claire! We’ll also link it in the notes we’ll publish with the recording https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01431161.2018.1558372

What’s the most exciting thing (hardware, software, or ML) on the horizon that would change the game for drones? (Other than changes to flight rules like line-of-sight)

Thanks Talia!

Check Lian Pin Koh from Conservation Drones talking about drones and hype cycle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ta-FwwwXxE

A huge limitation for us has been the noise from the drones! Although definitely more non-invasive than traditional survey methods, we still get responses from animals to the presence of the drone

Oooh Eadin, that is a big area we need to delve into. There are conversations on wildlabs about this

@eadin totally agree - we’re always doing our best to plan drone observations for minimal disturbance, but learning what works is a field in itself

Good Point Eadin! It might also be the form of the flying object. Chamois reacting to golden eagle shapes.

Smaller drones are quieter, but then you have shorter flight times - so big trade offs either way

using fixed wing over multirotor is a good solution to this if you have them

Do you think it will be usefull in the future to have several cameras on the same drone (for example: thermal + LIDAR or other couple) ?

Fixed wing might be even more problematic for some species.

Do you not need a large take off and landing area for fixed wings though Claire? I launch ours drones from a tiny research vessel and catch them out of the air directly.. (we have been using DJI magic 2 pros)

One adaptable mammal (American black bear) may, or may not, habituate to overflights of drones: https://doi.org/10.1093/conphys/coy067

One of the rare papers on that Topic.

are tiny blimps viable at all?

https://www.wildlabs.net/community/thread/432 - this conversation might be one we should revise

Here’s one of those WILDLABS threads on drone impacts on wildlife: https://www.wildlabs.net/community/thread/432

Ha ! Thanks talia

@eadin - you can hand launch some fixed wings, you sort of throw them at the sky and the fly. If yo have a waterproof body you can water land it then just scoop it up from the boat

yay open source :) ❤️

Agree with above comments about wildlife disturbance - we need to be really cautious. Encourage drone users to share their experiences, ideally through peer-reviewed literature but even anecdotally e.g. on the disturbance thread on WILDLABS Drones group will help to prevent us making the same mistakes

Approaching birds with drones: first experiments and ethical guidelineshttps://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0754

@Claire wow ill have to look into this!

There are some military-grade quadcopters in development that are interesting as well - but cost prohibitive probably for anything but the biggest budgets

In our case, smaller drone may cause some risk of bird attack. One of my drone was chased and attacked by eagle. Bigger drone will prevent this. In addition to that, I set my flying height at 200m where I found it safer based on bird of prey flying behavior

https://hrobotics.eu/

I found it surprising in Panama how much the animals seemed not as much affected by the little dji mavic flying around, maybe they are used to the loud cicada sounds

Also a model I love in development is https://www.flyzipline.com/ - a solution looking for a problem that would fit it in the conservation world

Thank you all for joining! You can continue the discussion on WILDLABS here: https://www.wildlabs.net/community/thread/809

If anyone is interested in drone ecology work - https://chrisdmarsh.wixsite.com/dronecology

thanks to all of you!

thanks for getting us together!

Next meetup will be on eDNA: https://www.wildlabs.net/resources/community-announcements/wildlabs-virtual-meetup-invitation-environmental-dna-edna

Thanks so much! This was wonderful!

Thanks all & thanks Steph for hosting!

Thanks everyone!

bye

Thanks a lot

Thank you everybody!

thank you