Brave new world of drone technology for biodiversity research and conservation

Land use change continues to be a major driver of biodiversity loss and carbon emissions worldwide. Remote sensing technology is increasingly being used to assess changes in land use, species distributions and carbon stocks. However, conventional satellite- and air-borne sensors can be prohibitively costly and inaccessible for researchers in developing countries. In 2012, we founded the ConservationDrones.org initiative (http://ConservationDrones.org) to introduce drone technology to the biological conservation community. Conservation drones are inexpensive and autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with cameras to record high quality video and photographic images. Aerial photographs can be stitched together to produce near real-time geo-referenced land use/cover maps of surveyed areas and even 3-dimensional forest models. I will talk about the various applications of conservation drones for ecological and conservation research