The monitoring of East Atlantic Flyway breeding and migratory waterbirds for management purposes has been vital and ongoing for many years.
Traditional methods using human observers pose challenges under certain conditions. For example, sites may be difficult or impossible to access, birds may gather in large numbers where count precision and accuracy affect results or where the risk of disturbing the birds is high.
This has prompted interest in exploring the potential to apply new drone-based methods for counting and mapping avian abundance and distributions. The use of such techniques offers gains in accuracy and efficiency and often allow surveys in areas previously physically inaccessible to observers. The experience of mapping and monitoring of breeding birds using systematic transect flights has been shown to be successful, especially for colony breeders such as spoonbills, cormorants, gulls and terns that were previously monitored by other methods along the East Atlantic Flyway.
Drones offer the possibility of supplementing traditional surveillance techniques in areas impossible to access or where birds are difficult to count conventionally or where ground visits incur unacceptable levels of disturbance.
Using human observers to count birds on drone-acquired imagery remains common but labour-intensive. Automation of wildlife detection in drone imagery is emerging as a faster, more precise and reproducible alternative in the future, but requires datasets for algorithm to facilitate automatic image processing. We conclude that drone-based methods offer new possibilities for highly accurate and effective counting and mapping of waterbirds, especially in the breeding season and in particular for ground-nesting colonial species. Recent results suggest that drones with thermal and zoom cameras can be effective monitoring cryptic species showing dispersed nesting in the landscape, new study finds.