Aerial Ecology: Drones Collect Environmental DNA (eDNA)
January 21st, 2015
Via MIT’s , an interesting report on the use of drones to advance ecological studies:
Drones carrying cameras or infrared sensors have already found favor with farmers, police forces, and extreme sports enthusiasts. Now engineers are testing versions of the tiny craft that can do more than just observe.
Prototypes able to swoop down to scoop up water samples are being developed to help ecologists, the oil industry, and others track oil leaks or invasive species. Some can even perform rudimentary analysis on the water they collect.
Commercial drone company PrecisionHawk, of Raleigh, North Carolina, is testing a water sampling drone with some clients in the oil industry. It takes the form of a seaplane and has a pump mounted on its pontoons that can handle even viscous swampwater thick with bugs, mud, or algae. The water is sucked into a container and then carried to a lab to check for signs of oil leaks or spills. (See a short video of the drone in action.)
“If you go up to Northern Canada or Alaska, there are literally thousands of ponds and lakes that are a few acres in size,” says PrecisionHawk CEO Ernest Earon. “Trying to walk through or take a boat to get water samples, it’s an almost impossible task.”
Earon says his team is now researching the possibility of a drone carrying a small spectrometer to analyze water for itself. That would save on energy-draining trips back to the lab.
YangQuan Chen, an engineering professor at the University of California, Merced, is testing a quadcopter drone with a buoyant frame that lands on water to collect a sample to be whisked to back to a lab for DNA extraction and sequencing.
The goal is to collect what is called environmental DNA, or eDNA, left behind by plants, animals, or other organisms. Analyzing eDNA provides a way to track diseases and endangered or invasive species. The technique is used to track populations of invasive Asian Carp around the Great Lakes, for example. Grabbing water samples by drone could make the approach more powerful by covering larger areas, says Chen. “There are some places that cannot be reached by boat or vehicle,” says Chen. “You simply cannot go there, so you have to use a drone.”
Chen says his biggest challenge has been to work out a way for the drone to land on moving water or during inclement weather. An onboard sensor registers wind gusts and software adjusts thrust in turn. The drone can scoop up water, but the researchers have not sequenced eDNA in the samples it collected.
In the long term, miniaturization of high-throughput genetic sequencing devices could allow drones to analyze their own samples, says geneticist Mike Miller of the University of California, Davis, who is collaborating with Chen. “Maybe in not that long, there’ll be drones deployed all over California, dipping down into water, sequencing all of the DNA on the fly and sending the data back to a central location,” Miller says.
Carrick Detweiler, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is working on a similar drone he calls a “Co-Aerial Ecologist.” It uses a one-meter dangling tube to suck water onboard like a straw. With water stored in onboard vials, it can then measure the samples’ temperature or conductivity (a proxy for salinity).
At a popular recreation area in Nebraska, Detweiler’s drone has already sampled from a series of small manmade lakes for toxic algae. The task routinely takes a crew of humans 12 to 14 hours, but the drone can do it in about two. The drone has also been used to search Nebraska waterways for the larvae of the invasive zebra mussel.
Detweiler predicts that there will soon be many more hands-on drones appearing. “The next generation of vehicles five to 10 years from now will be capable of getting really close to the environment, like water-sampling or collecting leaf samples,” he says. Detweiler has begun work on a drone that plucks leaves from crops with a mechanical arm, to determine the health of plants, or identify the exact variety of a weed infesting a corn field.
Chen hopes that drones like these could become cheap enough for just about anybody to use. PrecisionHawk’s seaplane drone costs $16,500 even without water sampling gear, which is scheduled to be available as an optional extra later this year. That’s cheap for oil companies but too expensive for many environmental organizations or scientists.
Chen believes that his design could lead to a water sampling drone that costs only $1,000. He envisions ecologists and even journalists being able to routinely sample bodies of water for analysis at the lab, providing a new layer of environmental oversight. “We need to make it affordable,” he says.
,
Read More »Drone Conservation Mapping In Namibia
January 10th, 2015
Via Drone Adventures, a look at some of the variety of uses for drone mapping in conservation:
There is much talk on how to use drone mapping technology for nature conservation. However, projects with applicable results for both conservation land use management as well as wildlife conservation, such as animal counts, are few and far between. This past May, Drone Adventures teamed up with Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve, as well as the Polytechnic of Namibia to carry out a two-week mapping mission to explore the variety of uses that drone mapping can offer nature conservation.
Nature conservation in Namibia
The nature conservation field is known to make use of new technologies to support the hard and continuous efforts that are made worldwide by researchers, local communities, governments and hundreds of NGO’s on a daily basis to conserve the many natural wonders and animal species that try to co-habit with the ever growing human population. Namibia is on the forefront of nature conservation, and not only the government but also a large number of private landowners and local communities in conjunction with tourism companies dedicate vast efforts to conserve the semi-arid savannas and desert environments that make up 90% of the country’s surface.
Trans- and interdisciplinary research initiative
Our mission was part of a trans- and interdisciplinary research initiative led by Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve in conjunction with the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Lausanne (EPFL) and the Polytechnic of Namibia. Our part of this initiative was to acquire imagery with light-weight drones and various cameras, including multi-spectral cameras, to produce up-to-date, high-resolution maps and models for data analysis. In line with Drone Adventures’ spirit, the initiative’s goal was to share the resulting maps and models as well as the knowledge on hard- and software use with all involved parties and the local community. In view of the vast mapping mission that lay before us and the many questions our research partners wanted to answer with their in-depth analysis, two Drone Adventures teams relayed each other, each on Namibian ground for a week, to fly our drones and process the thousands of images acquired…
Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve
Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve is a local reserve managed by private landowners. Dr. Friedrich Reinhard, co-manager of the reserve as well as leader of the research initiative hosted the Drone Adventures team for 8 days on his 10’000 ha reserve with a long list of areas to map in hand. His mapping needs for Kuzikus included:
– Animal counts using drone technology
– Drone mapping for sustainable land management and land health assessment
Sharing knowledge at Polytechnic of Namibia
Namibia’s universities, such as the Polytechnic School of Namibia or UNAM (University of Namibia) prepare the engineers, researchers and tourism professionals of tomorrow to address the many challenges of nature conservation to preserve the country’s unique landscapes and wildlife all the while using these resources to support the local economy through responsible tourism and farming. At their request, after hearing about the initiative led on Kuzikus, we led a half-day workshop bringing together engineers, professors, students, researchers and government specialists. The goal of this workshop was to introduce the basics of drone mapping technology and our first experiences made on Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve the prior days. In addition to sharing our knowledge on hard- and software as well as our various mapping experiences, the excitement and interest of the workshop reached its peak during the flight demonstration that proved how easy and accessible drone mapping technology has become.
Drone mapping at Gobabeb Research & Training Center in the Namib desert
The Gobabeb Research and Training Centre is an internationally recognized center for dry land training and research, located in the Namib Desert. Gobabeb’s mission is to be a catalyst for gathering, disseminating and implementing understanding of arid environments. With many specialized research projects, Gobabeb was the perfect place to add another dimension to our Namibian mission: testing how drones and photogrammetry software can handle the difficult environment of one of the driest deserts on earth all the while producing meaningful results. We spent 2 days at Gobabeb. The first day was used for providing geo-referenced orthomosaics and 3D models for an ongoing research project on the endemic !Nara plant, distributed over long corridors in the dune valleys. A total of 3 flights over the valley, with both RGB and RE (Red Edge) cameras provided a 5km long, 500 meter wide corridor map with enough detail to easily geo-locate and assess the !Nara plants. Very much like just some days before in Windhoek, the second day was used to host a workshop for the researchers of Gobabeb, introducing the elements of drone mapping to them and sharing discussions on how this technology can help their research projects.
First answer, more questions
While this first nature conservation mission was able to test the use of drones for nature conservation purposes, the initial results lead to many more questions. During this mission, many additional possibilities of use have been determined, not only on Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve but also at the Gobabeb Research & Training Center. The possibility of using NIR and multi-spectral sensors to compliment terrestrial research for rare plant species such as the Welwitschia or !Nara plants endemic to the Namib desert, offers not only additional research possibilities but also more efficient surveying of larger areas that are difficult to access on foot or car.
Our goal is to find additional funding to return to Namibia in spring 2015. A second mission to the same areas would enable follow-up on research and provide updated maps of areas already surveyed during this first mission as well as map new areas in the Namib desert to produce high-resolution maps and indices for the Gobabeb researchers.
In the meantime, researchers at Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve, EPFL and UNAM are hard at work analyzing the 350Gb of data that we collected during our short stay. As we gather more concrete results in animal counting and identification, plant health analysis and land management we’ll be posting follow-up stories, hopefully inspiring further research and bringing drone-mapping technology into the hands of conservation leaders.
The mission in numbers:
14 days
2 teams
4 DA members on Namibian ground
4 local researchers involved
91 flights
30 % of Kuzikus making 3000 ha mapped
5 different cameras used (RGB, NIR, RE, Multi-spectral
14963 images acquired
45 hours of mapping
384 hours of processing dataMission partners and sponsors
In addition to our local mission partners Kuzikus and Polytech of Namibia, this mission is part of the SAVMAP project. SAVMAP is co-funded by CODEV (Cooperation & Development Center of EPFL) through LASIG, the Laboratory of Geographic Information Systems of EPFL).
The Drone Adventures team used senseFly eBee mapping drones and Pix4D software for data processing and orthomosaic generation. A special thanks to our friends at Mapbox for hosting our data online.
,
Read More »Drones In Conservation
December 5th, 2014
Via National Geographic, a look at the role drones can play in wildlife conservation efforts:
In the international fight against poaching, eyes in the sky could make all the difference.
But drones are expensive and hard to fly, putting them out of reach of many park managers.
For the Wildlife Conservation Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Challenge, an international competition that runs until next spring, 137 teams of students, hobbyists, and engineers from 29 countries are designing and building affordable, easy-to-use drones for the rangers of South Africa’s Kruger National Park. The goal: unmanned aircraft that can scan Kruger for poaching activity and map routes for the rangers to apprehend traffickers.
Here are five ways drones are being used on the front lines of wildlife conservation around the world. (View photos of elephants and anti-poaching efforts.)
1. Fighting Wildlife Crime
Drones already act as wildlife police, scoping out poachers in Kenya and Nepal. With a $5 million grant from Google, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has launched aerial surveillance in remote areas in Africa and Asia, where endangered species like elephants and rhinoceroses are most vulnerable to illegal trafficking.
Beyond poaching, unmanned aircraft are tackling illegal fishing, hunting, and burning. In Belize, drones are saving threatened fish populations by finding vessels that are over their catch limits, fishing without permits, or in restricted waters.
2. Getting Up Close
By getting nearer to animals than people often can, drones take intimate photographs and collect solid data. Piloted by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Vancouver Aquarium, a hexacopter drone (a remote-controlled aircraft with six rotors) recently hovered 100 feet (30 meters) above a group of killer whales off British Columbia, Canada. With images from the drone, scientists were able get a better picture of which whales were malnourished, which were pregnant, and which were likely to die.
3. Counting Populations
Getting an accurate population size not only tells park managers how much food and habitat is needed for a certain species, but also how threatened that species might be. (Read about other drone uses ranging from border patrol to crop dusting.)
In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service are using a retired Raven A—an aircraft once deployed in warfare that’s been replaced by sleeker combat drones—to tally sandhill cranes, a popular game bird.
“It’s a safer alternative to the fixed-wing aircrafts we’ve been using since the 1950s,” said Leanne Hanson, the USGS biologist flying the drone. “When they’re roosting at night, the cranes are not disturbed when the Raven flies over. They don’t flush off and collide mid-air.”
4. Getting the Big Picture
To understand how climate change and industrial development affect wildlife, ecologists need a birds-eye view. National Geographic grantee Jeffrey Kerby uses drones to map caribou habitat in west Greenland, tracking changes in plant cover and sea ice over time.
Designed specifically for conservation, inexpensive, ecologist-made drones have flown over northern Sumatra, Indonesia, where demand for palm oil has destroyed palm tree habitat for orangutans. The drones detected where the furry orange animals nest and where logging and forest fires were happening. (View photos of drones taking on hurricanes and fires.)
“[Surveying habitats] is a very time-consuming and labor-intensive task, requiring researchers to spend days hiking through the forest looking for these nests,” said Lian Pin Koh, an ecologist who worked in Sumatra and a pioneer in drone conservation. “A forest that would normally require one to two weeks to survey can be done in a few days using a drone.”
5. Doing Chores
Drones also assist in the unsexy tasks of conservation, including weeding and fence mending. In 2012, a Raven aircraft scanned Hawaii’s Haleakala National Park for tears in the park’s fence and for miconia, an invasive weed threatening native Hawaiian flora.
The mission wasn’t as successful as hoped—high winds made for blurry pictures. But the drone saved the rangers the trouble of navigating the park’s extreme temperatures and rugged terrain, said Matt Brown, Haleakala’s chief resource manager. The pictures were clear enough that rangers were able to identify places worth visiting to check on ripped fences and troublesome weeds.
,
Read More »Joint Chinese-Brazilian Satellite Program Helps Save Amazonian Forests
December 1st, 2014
Via China Daily, a report on a joint Chinese-Brazilian monitoring program:
Deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon dropped 18 percent this year, reaching the second-lowest recorded level since monitoring started in 1988, the Brazilian Ministry of Environment announced in a press briefing on Nov 24.
According to the data, an estimated 4,848 square kilometers of forests were cleared in the 12-month period to June 2014, compared with 5,891 square kilometers in the previous 12-month period.
“In the last five years Brazil registered the five lowest deforestation rates ever recorded for the Amazon,” Brazil’s Minister of Environment Izabella Teixeira said.
The rate is an estimate based on analysis of satellite images from Landsat and the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS), a series of remote sensing satellites built by Brazil and China, each covering an area up to 6.25 hectares.
The CBERS Program was born from a partnership signed between Brazil and China on July 6, 1988, and renewed in 2004, in the space technical scientific segment. The program involves the Chinese Academy of Space Technology (CAST), and the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), to develop a program to build and operate two advanced remote sensing satellites.
With the financial and technological resources from China and Brazil, an investment exceeding $300 million, a system of shared responsibilities was created (70 percent Chinese and 30 percent Brazilian) with the intent to implement a complete system of remote sensing internationally.
With the program, Brazil has obtained a powerful tool to monitor its huge territory by its own remote sensing satellites, looking forward to consolidate an important autonomy in this segment.
The CBERS’s family of remote sensing satellites brought to Brazil significant scientific advances. This significance is attested by the more than 35,000 users from more than 2,500 organizations registered as active CBERS users, and also by the 800,000 CBERS images, distributed at the approximate rate of 250 every day.
Images generated by CBERS satellites are used in important areas, as deforestation control and environmental monitoring in the Amazon Region, water resources monitoring, urban growth, soil occupation, education and several other applications.
It is also fundamental for large national and strategic projects, for example Brazilian Amazon Forest Satellite Monitoring Project (PRODES), which evaluates and monitors the deforestation of the sugar-cane areas.
This time, the data provided through the PRODES project is carried out by Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE).
The data will be consolidated during the first half of 2015 and submitted by the Brazilian government for external auditing. The new 2014 data represents a reduction of 83 percent in deforestation rates compared to 2004 levels, and indicate a resumption of the trend of falling deforestation in Brazil.
Deforestation rates dropped in most Brazilian states in the Amazon region. Historically marked by high rates of cleared forests, the state of Para showed a 22 percent drop in deforestation, with 1,829 square kilometers of cleared forest recorded in the 12 months to June 2014, compared with 2,346 square kilometers recorded in the previous 12 months. The most significant reduction was registered in the state of Maranhao where the rate of deforestation fell by 39 percent. Increases were registered only in the states of Roraima (37 percent) and Acre (41 percent).
According to Minister Teixeira, the reduction is a result of several factors including the work of enforcement teams and a task force for the environmental regularization of rural properties, in accordance with the new Forestry Code.
The new numbers bring Brazil closer to meeting its voluntary climate change mitigation targets established under the National Policy on Climate Change, aimed at reducing projected greenhouse gas emissions by between 36.1 and 39.6 percent by 2020.
“All the work on Brazil’s climate agenda is being carried out,” said Minister Teixeira.
The 20th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP20) starts next week, in Lima, Peru, where representatives from 190 countries will discuss new reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions.
,
Read More »Enviro-Net: ‘Game-Changing’ Sensors Revolutionize Methods Of Monitoring Climate Science Data
November 20th, 2014
Via the Calgary Herald, a report on a state of the art wireless sensor network that can be deployed in remote forests around the world to monitor high resolution photosynthesis and seasonal productivity trends to help track patterns in carbon dynamics near the Earth’s surface:
About 300 cellphone-sized sensors installed in the forest north of Peace River are the front lines of a revolution in climate science set in motion by University of Alberta scientists.
From his office on U of A campus, professor Arturo Sanchez can tell whether the forest soil is getting drier, whether spring is early or late, or whether lightning caused a forest fire — all from data streaming dozens of times a minute from the sensors.
“It’s so cool,” says the upbeat professor in the department of earth and atmospheric science and project leader working with a team of Canadian and international scientists. The data is so detailed it can measure how much carbon dioxide the forest is absorbing or emitting, how much sunlight plants are using in photosynthesis, and predict a drought.
The Alberta-developed technology is “a game changer” for researchers and a new tool in the world’s battle to monitor climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says Sanchez.
It’s also a great new tool to help Alberta policy-makers understand the environmental impacts of oilsands development or forestry companies and how to mitigate the impacts, he says.
Next week, Sanchez will take the system, called Enviro-Net, to a UN climate change conference in Lima, Peru, so the rest of the world can take advantage of this major scientific advance.
The concept of real-time measuring came to Sanchez but the technology wasn’t there. So the U of A team had to built the specialized sensor which records 64 different climate details.
This one records two measurements every second and sends the data to a tower in the forest which relays it to the university.
“The University of Alberta has the capacity when faced with challenges to develop the technology,” Sanchez adds.
The next problem was how to deal with the massive flow of data streaming in every second all day and all night from the censors; how to find the trends and changes.
“In other words, how to move from data to knowledge,” says Sanchez.
That’s where IBM came in with its software capable of handling large data streams — called advanced analytics.
The software provides real-time analysis for 10,000 points of data per second from sensors now placed in Australia, Costa Rica, Brazil and Mexico as well as Alberta.
“You can quickly see a trend line if soil moisture is rising or falling,” he says.
The team chose the Peace River area for a test site about 2-1/2 years ago. The idea was to get baseline data about the health of forests before oilsands development takes off.
“We are finding out what are the conditions of the environment, the health of the forest, before development starts,” Sanchez says.
Over the years, policy-makers can watch in real time the changes and measure them against the baseline data.
This Enviro-Net tool will enhance Alberta’s ability to provide world-class environmental monitoring and keep track of changes due to climate change as well, Sanchez notes.
This technology will benefit many countries and that’s why the U of A is taking the system to the public, he adds.
In Costa Rica, for instance, the sensors revealed that a forest there, under drought conditions, absorbed 40-per-cent less carbon than the year before.
That’s a key piece of information for the country which is trying to become carbon neutral by 2020, says Sanchez, who began working on the system four years ago.
Scientists used to collect data themselves in the forest, then took months to analyze it and report it.
“Now we can basically ‘see’ the forest breathing in real time,” he says.
,
Read More »Ten Ways Remote Sensing Can Contribute To Conservation
November 18th, 2014
Via Terra Daily, a report on ways in which remote sensing can contribute to conservation:
Scientists from the WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society), NASA, and other organizations have partnered to focus global attention on the contribution of satellites to biodiversity conservation in a recently released study entitled “Ten Ways Remote Sensing Can Contribute to Conservation,” featured in the latest edition of the scientific journal Conservation Biology.
Addressing global questions requires global datasets that are enabled by satellite remote sensing; this paper highlights the way in which continuous observations of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere can advance our understanding of how and why the Earth is changing and inform actions that can be taken to halt the degradation of planet’s natural systems.
The findings of the paper will inform discussions on improving protected area management that are underway at the IUCN World Parks Congress, an event held every 10 years by the global conservation community.
Established in many cases to conserve wildlife and the ecosystems they inhabit, protected areas still fall short of protecting species and their ecological needs. In many instances, protected areas such as Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in The Republic of Congo do not cover the full range of species such as elephants. Remote sensing can be used to gather information needed for managing landscapes beyond protected area networks.
“Remote sensing data from orbiting satellites have been used to measure, understand, and predict environmental changes since the 1970s, but technology that subsequently became available can now be applied much more widely on a whole range of conservation issues,” said WCS Conservation Support scientist Dr. Robert Rose, the lead author of the study.
“To that end, we sought out the top thought leaders in conservation and the remote sensing community to identify the best conservation applications of these data.”
“Collaborations such as these that strengthen ties between disparate research communities will create new opportunities to advance conservation,” said co-author Dr Allison Leidner of NASA’s Earth Science Division. “For example, it will help remote sensing scientists tailor their research to meet the needs of field-based researchers and conservation practitioners.”
With funding from NASA to lead the study, Rose and his co-authors brought together 32 thought leaders from both the conservation and remote-sensing communities. The participants interviewed more than 100 experts in both fields and generated 360 questions, which were then whittled down to the Top 10 conservation examples on how remote sensing can be used, including:
+ Species distribution and abundances
+ Species movements and life stages
+ Ecosystem processes
+ Climate change
+ Rapid response
+ Protected areas
+ Ecosystem services
+ Conservation effectiveness
+ Agricultural/aquiculture expansion and changes in land use/cover
+ Degradation and disturbance regimes
With this study, the authors hope to jumpstart a new collaborative initiative that provides guidance to space agencies and other partners on how future Earth observation satellite missions can contribute to advancing wildlife protection and protected area management.
Toward that end, the authors initiated the Conservation Remote Sensing Network, which currently has 350 members from around the world, all of whom are interested in applying remote-sensing data to a broad array of conservation challenges.
“A vital part of this new network, which will foster communications and build opportunities between the conservation and remote sensing communities and help develop new remote sensing capabilities, will be to generate interest from both the public and private sector to invest in the use of orbiting Earth observatories to help conserve the planet’s remaining biodiversity,” added Dr. David Wilkie of WCS’s Conservation Support Program.
,
Read More »