Meeting Abstract
New technologies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly evolving and often have potential for enhancing ongoing ecological and conservation research. In the current study, preprogrammed flight plans were evaluated as a method for facilitating and standardizing aerial surveys at the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle’s primary nesting beach at Rancho Nuevo, MX. Several different commercially available UAV’s were evaluated including two models of quadcopters (DJI Phantom 3 Pro and Phantom 4 Pro). All UAVs were equipped with 4K resolution cameras. Video survey flight patterns were developed prior to surveys using Google Maps via a Litchi App for computer tablets. This UAV system proved to be a reliable and consistent method of conducting standardized surveys both for near-shore waters and for the nesting. Although a UAV pilot initiated and monitored all missions via a live HD video feed, the UAV system autonomously flew each survey and recorded high resolution video. Additionally, a Pix4D Capture App was used with these UAVs to conduct preprogrammed photo surveys of the nesting beach topography. The data were then processed with Pix4Dmapper to produce 3-D mapping of the nesting beach. The results included turtle abundance surveys at two week intervals over the 2017 nesting season, and provided a high resolution 3-D topographical mapping of the central 10 km of the primary nesting beach. This research was conducted as part of the ongoing Kemp’s Ridley Bi-National Conservation Program.
