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Will Drones Reduce Investigator Disturbance to Surface-nesting Birds?

S. Borrelle,A. Fletcher

Published 2017 in Marine Ornithology

ABSTRACT

Marine Ornithology 45: 89–94 (2017) Unmanned aerial systems (UASs or drones) are increasingly used for conservation and ecological applications (Linchant et al. 2015, Schiffman 2014). Advances in consumer electronics, open-source flight-control software, and data-transfer protocols are rapidly reducing the cost and expertise required to use drones for a range of disciplines (Crutsinger et al. 2016). The rapid deployment of drones in ecology has provided unique opportunities to advance our understanding of many systems and species (Grémillet et al. 2012, Hodgson et al. 2016). Conservation drones have been deployed to reduce poaching of Rhinoceros Ceratotherium spp. in South Africa by the Olifants West Conservancy (Bergenas et al. 2013), to survey elephants Loxodonta spp. in South Africa (Vermeulen et al. 2013), to survey orang-utan Pongo obelii nests in Sumatra (Wich et al. 2015), and to survey marine mammals (Koski et al. 2010, Smith et al. 2016). They have also been used in seabird research (e.g., Grémillet et al. 2012, McClellan et al. 2016; Table 1). Indeed, the application of such technology aligns well with conservationists’ and ecologists’ data requirements for seabird research; better, in fact, than alternative remote-sensing methods, such as satelliteor airplane-based sensors (Hodgson et al. 2016). Therefore, it is not surprising that there is an increase in research using drone-collected data and in publications on the subject (van Gemert et al. 2014). However, caution is needed with regard to potential adverse impacts of drone interactions for sensitive species (Vas et al. 2015).

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