Very interested in making contact with on this topic please can you pop me an e-mail [email protected] or call me on 0825721314

Greetings,

Francois

Great initiative!

Just a short note: any position to distinguish garbage from real snares?

Best!

Lufer@Landfeelings

Hi Nilaksha (and everyone else),

I have been looking at the application of thermal to improve the automated detection through RGB imagery. One of the large drawbacks of thermal is the lower resolution. This is impart cost but also down to basic physics, IR light has a much longer wavelength and therefore a sensor can't have as many 'pixels' on it compared to an RGB sensor. This implies that you either need a thermal camera lens with a longer focal length, which reduces the area you cover, or you need to fly much lower. The drawback of the latter is you cover much less ground per unit of time/battery and you have the potential of disturbing the animals.

I know that DJI have recently released a starlight camera combined with thermal (DJI Enterprise Zenmuse H20N). It looks very impressive but I have not yet managed to test it. Being self-funded as well I have opted for hiring in a drone company to fly for me with the state of the art equipment rather than buying and flying myself. 

Hope that helps and keen to hear how you get on!

Hi Antoine,

I would recommend talking to the engineers at Outreach Robotics - @Gcharron .

We have been working on collecting tools for rare plants, and I would guess it wouldn't be a huge adjustment to collect elephant dung.  I think the amount of dung required for analysis will drive the size of the collecting drone. Maybe the drone could be up very high to not disturb the elephants with a long line sampling mechanism? 

Hello Stephanie,

I am not sure if you are still monitoring this thread, but if you need any information, please let me know. I have flown drones for a couple of years in Zimbabwe and South Africa in conservation and anti-poaching operations. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Regarding the £500-700 range you mentioned, it seems waaaayyyy overpriced. Those rates are usually charged by lawyers and accountants in South Africa.

If you have found the information you were seeking, I wish you all the best.

Quin

Hi Steph,

I think everyone below has summarised it pretty well.

A couple of comments to add.

Select your pilot well - We offer drone flying services. This wasn't our intention, initially, however we have determined that there are many drone pilots, but fewer who do it really well. Having said that, we work predominantly with animal tracking equipment, not just flying straight line vectors, if this is what you are undertaking.

In Australia, fees to become a pilot are about $5,000 AUD, and a reasonable commercial drone with changeable payload capability costs around $20,000- $30,000 AUD, and then as is suggested below, there are insurance and factoring in repairs and maintenance, and of course eventual replacement costs, travel, an hourly rate as wages etc. Obviously, the day rates you have listed aren't profit, they include cost.

Paul

Wildlife Drones

Hi, I have used a commercial company for drone work for my PhD and they were willing to give me a significant discount for research purposes. One thing to consider is that in SA a drone pilot requires a pilots license and there is quite some red tape to go through which does make it much more complex than just going out and buying a drone oneself. The price you mention seems on the high side to me but I'm not sure if that already includes the drone, sensors, flight permissions, travel of the pilot to and from your location and any other costs.

I have no familiarity with Lightroom, but the problem you describe seems like a pretty typical data storage and look up issue.  This is the kind of problem that many software engineers deal with on a daily bases.  In almost every circumstance this class of problem is solved using a database.

In fact, a potentially useful analysis is that the Lightroom database is not providing the feature set you need.

It seems likely that you are not looking for a software development project, and setting up you own DB would certainly require some effort, but if this is a serious issue for your work, you hope to scale your work up, or bring many other participants into your project, it might make sense to have an information system that better fits your needs.

There are many different databases out there optimized for different sorts of things.  For this I might suggest taking a look at MongoDB with GridFS for a couple of reasons.

1. It looks like you meta data is in JSON format.  Many DBs are JSON compatible, but Mongo is JSON native.  It is especially good at storing and retrieving JSON data.  Its JSON search capabilities are excellent and easy to use.  It looks like you could export your data directly from Lightroom into Mongo, so it might be pretty easy actually.
2. Mongo with the GridFS package is an excellent repository for arbitrarily large image files.
3. It is straightforward to make a Mongo database accessible via a website.
4. They are open source (in a manner of speaking) and you can run it for free.

Disclaimer: I used to work for MongoDB.  I don't anymore and I have no vested interest at all, but they make a great product that would really crush this whole class of problem.

Hi!

I would take a look at 

Although developed for camera trap imagery, it is by no means restricted to such.

Cheers,

Lars

They will be great for crocs. I'm sure the RSPB can provide a presentation of the variety of applications we have used UAV's for including bird monitoring, nest finding, habitat assessments and their limitations/ legislation/ technicalities.

The link above does not seem to work but this does: https://wildlabs.net/sites/default/files/community/files/drones_for_gis_-_best_practice_v2.0.pdf