Applications of Drones in Wildlife and Environmental Conservation:by Bharat Adhikari | 01-08-2018 01:40 |
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 Drones: An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS); which include a UAV, a ground-based controller, and a system of communications between the two. The flight of UAVs may operate with various degrees of autonomy: either under remote control by a human operator or autonomously by onboard computers.
Compared to manned aircraft, UAVs were originally used for missions too "dull, dirty or dangerous" for humans. While they originated mostly in military applications, their use is rapidly expanding to commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and other applications, such as policing, peacekeeping, and surveillance, product deliveries, aerial photography, agriculture, smuggling, and drone racing. Civilian UAVs now vastly outnumber military UAVs, with estimates of over a million sold by 2015, so they can be seen as an early commercial application of autonomous things, to be followed by the autonomous car and home robots.
Applications in Wildlife and Environmental Conservation: Eco-drones have the potential to supplement data collection efforts and contribute to ecosystem inventory and accounting. Specific environmental and ecosystem applications suitable for the use of a drone can range from precision agriculture, to mapping coastline or soil erosion, to species and habitat monitoring. Drones can be launched into the eye of a hurricane to measure wind speed at altitudes and conditions in which a manned aircraft could not and they can fly over the Artic to observe sea ice conditions and track seal populations (NOAA, 2008). One of the most common civil applications is rangeland management (Rango and Laliberte, 2010).
Environmental examples are many: analysis of deforestation and planning for reforestation, analysis of environmental disasters, such as earthquakes, flooding, and drought. Disasters such as fires as well, the fire brigade in various countries are finding this tool very beneficial to find the hotpoint of fires thus be more effective in tackling the problem.
There are also some very interesting uses for drones for wildlife. Drones can also be used for studying animals, monitoring their breeding, wintering, migration tracking endangered species and even counting birds within a colony.
Poaching is a big problem in many countries which causes not only the death of many animals but also human fatalities due to poachers resorting to killing anyone trying to stop them of their horrors.
The drones are being used to search the herd and find where potential poachers will attack, they are also used to find the poachers and safeguard the lives of park guards who unfortunately often face gun fire from poachers
Use of drones for monitoring destructive activities such as poaching and illegal logging have been notably applied in Africa, Asia and South America.
Applications of drones to wild animal monitoring have been rapidly increasing worldwide (Christie et al. 2016; Ivosevic et al. 2015; 2017; Jones et al. 2006; Koh and Wich 2012; Linchant et al. 2015). In particular, monitoring studies targeting birds that are physically difficult to access or susceptible to human interference have been constantly made using drones (Hodgson et al. 2016; Sarda-Palomera et al. 2012)
Technology has its place and can offer us great tools for our benefit, these tools are not a replacement but an extra so that we can work and create a better place to live for every living creature.
Nowadays misuse of drones is seen everywhere. Please do not misuse drones. 😊 😊
"Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master."- Christian Lous Lange
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