Hi, new to Wildlabs and happy to have found it
I am currently working on drone design (fixed wing), for the purpose of monitoring illegal fishing vessels. This will be done via camera sensors, and potentially an IR sensor for night missions.
We are designing the drone and application from the ground up, and I wanted to ask if anyone out there has used drones for ID of particular subject, or series of subjects, say, animal populations etc? And if so, I would love to hear about the post-recording data workflow.
With 3 cameras on our drone I will be collecting a great deal of vessel data, and am currently trying to design protocols for a workflow to bring that data into something useful (gis, written reports,etc). If anyone has had any experience of this I would love to hear from you
Cheers!
30 March 2023 6:12pm
Sounds like an awesome project! Tracking vessels is notoriously difficult because they can switch off their transponders. ( but check out https://www.skylight.global/ where they try to calculate/guesstimate those vessels anyways ) and if you are tracking small boats near the coast then they may not even have a transponder. Also, since AI can identify species and even individuals, there should be little problems with recognizing vessels.
I can not answer your question specifically, but it seems that your workflow problem is similar to that of working with camera traps, and there seems to be plenty of software for that. ... on second thoughts, you probably thought of that but did not find what you are looking for?
![](https://wildlabs.net/sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/picture-7169-1580593423-7169.jpg?itok=FtlJcyj_)
Lonnie McCaskill
Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)
1 April 2023 10:23pm
We gave a drone to a marine reserve in Myumba National Park inGabon with great results!
![](/sites/default/files/inline-images/image_35.png)
9 August 2024 12:48pm
Hi all,
maybe it helps 😉 My free manual 'Drones in Biomonitoring' - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8077113 can help to get (more) knowledge how to proceed easily and successfully 😉 It covers topics from buy to fly and data processing.
📖 The manual was developed to help authorities, landscape conservation / maintenance or nature conservation associations etc. in nature conservation to manage their growing monitoring tasks more effectively and cost-efficiently.
🛸 The use of drones can contribute in many ways to increasing the effectiveness of monitoring, reducing costs and minimizing disturbance - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steffen-Doering.
Best regards!
Steffen
Frank van der Most
RubberBootsData