Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) (often popularly referred to as "drones"), are well known as military and intelligence gathering tools. Their use in natural resource management and science, however is only just beginning to be recognized and developed. The potential for these devices to gather high quality spatially based information fits squarely in an unfilled niche between ground observation and satellite systems. Since manned flight is the leading cause of work-related mortality of wildlife biologists in the U.S., UAS also have enormous and very personal relevance for improving safety in our field. During the past 12 years, the Florida Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit has spearheaded an interdisciplinary team of aerospace, geomatics, statistics, and ecology researchers with the goal of developing a UAS specifically for natural resource work.

Worldwide, UAS development has been driven by rapid technological improvements such as miniaturization of digital cameras, new frontiers in battery and materials technology, and the rapid development of high capacity memory components. However, the University of Florida (UF) Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit effort has always been driven by the desire to solve specific ecological questions. The Nova 2.1 ? the current version of the UAS technology ? is a state-of-the-art, autonomous, amphibious aircraft specifically designed to address questions about wildlife populations and habitats.

The hand-launched airplane has a nine-foot wingspan and can land on water or dry ground. The Nova 2.1 has flight duration of 90 minutes and can cover approximately a square kilometer during a typical survey. The sensor is a digital SLR camera equipped with its own GPS/inertial measuring unit, but many kinds of sensors could be carried. The system can deliver images of 2.5cm per camera pixel at 100 meters altitude ? good enough to count eggs in open nests. Individual images of a study area can be mosaiced and used as a GIS layer, within which geometric accuracy is <1 m. For ecologists and wildlife managers, this capability means highly accurate, reproducible imagery that can be used as repeated, temporal overlays. Now that the Nova 2.1 is aeronautically and electronically stable, the next big frontiers are image post-processing, machine learning, image recognition, novel statistical techniques, and application driven adaptations.

The Nova 2.1 is beginning to be deployed in a variety of real world applications. The repeated overlay capability has already provided a handy, quantitative solution to a long-standing problem of estimating turnover in colonial nesting birds. Florida CRU faculty and students have also teamed with the University of Idaho to evaluate fine scale characteristics of pygmy rabbit habitat, and estimate burrow density. In collaboration with Idaho Fish and Game, the UAS will be used to estimate Chinook salmon redd density in relation to habitat characteristics, and to estimate white pelican colony size. Computer scientists and ecologists at the University of Central Florida will be using UAS data to estimate nesting sea turtle population size and to differentiate beach tracks of loggerhead, green and leatherback sea turtles. The Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands at Colorado State University is teaming with UF to assess waterbird distribution and abundance at the Patuxent Naval Air Station. For the US Army Corps of Engineers, the fine-grained Nova 2.1 data were used as ground truth for coarse-grained satellite data to more accurately map plant communities in the Everglades.

Unmanned aircraft systems have huge potential as a tool to fill the gap between a biologist on the ground with a pair of binoculars and satellite imagery. The examples above illustrate that UAS also have the ability to provide wildlife ecologists with not just static images, but highly accurate and repeatable GIS products. This opens the door to investigations at a geographic scale for wildlife, and the ability to produce statistically robust results. When coupled with the ability to fly in remote areas dangerous for manned aircraft, removing human safety from the picture, UAS could turn out to be as important to ecologists and managers as satellite imagery has been.

Each month, the ONB features articles from Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units across the country. Working with key cooperators, including WMI, Units are leading exciting, new wildlife research projects that we believe our readers will appreciate reading about.