The potential of drones to advance tropical ecology and conservation

Luisa Gomez Correa, Helene Muller-Landau, KC Cushman

Drones, also known as remotely piloted aerial systems, are a rapidly developing remote sensing technology with many potential applications in tropical ecology research and conservation. Drones can be equipped with a variety of sensors including ordinary (RGB) cameras, multispectral cameras, thermal cameras, hyperspectral sensors, and lidar. Data collection and processing methods are advancing rapidly, particularly in terms of automating processes such as data extraction and processing, and integrating artificial intelligence into their workflows. Despite the great potential of these tools, they remain relatively little deployed in tropical forests. This in part reflects enduring challenges in applying them to reliably map forest structure, dynamics, and composition, in particular due to difficulties with precise georeferencing, alignment of time-series data, segmentation (delineation) of individual trees, and species identification. In addition, there has to date been relatively limited diffusion to date of knowledge of how to use drones for tropical forest research and conservation.  



In this open format session, we aim to highlight innovative and diverse drone-related research applications in tropical ecology and conservation, and explore advances and ongoing challenges in data collection and processing, through a combination of short talks and discussion. Some talks will showcase applications to a variety of questions in different tropical ecosystems; others will share technological advances in data collection and processing. The session will consist of 90 minutes of talks, a mix of 5-minute and 10-minute presentations, followed by a 30-minute stakeholder-led panel discussion with audience participation. Audience participation will be guided by proposed debate questions and open audience input, and we expect to increase audience participation through interactive polls and/or surveys via mobile apps. 



We anticipate that this session will be of broad interest to ATBC members, including researchers already using drones in their work and researchers interested in drones for future projects. Remote sensing methods are becoming more accessible to the tropical ecology community as the cost of drones decreases and the availability of commercially available drone systems increases. However, with rapid advancement in this area, many researchers have questions about what is currently possible with drone methods, and how to get started on new drone-based projects. This session will bring together experts from multiple research networks to highlight and discuss the current state of the field.