While companies like Amazon, Flirtey, and Zipline continue to use drones for deliveries, a group of ornithologists at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania have studied a different way to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
By suspending a “simple, lightweight recorder” below a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter drone, Gettysburg College environmental studies professor Andrew Wilson and two undergraduate students studied songbirds and published their results in The Auk: Ornithological Advances. The study, called “The feasibility of counting songbirds using unmanned aerial vehicles,” found that data on songbirds compiled with a drone was comparable to that of “standard counts for most species.”
Noise from the drones caused issues
Why would you bother using a drone to study birds in the first place? “Because audio bird recordings are generally from ground-based or close-to-ground recorders, they may still be limited by site accessibility and the logistical constraints of traversing difficult terrain,” the study reads. “However, aerial recordings have greater range and mobility and can be used to access sites normally not surveyed by terrestrial methods.”
In other words, you can cover a lot more ground with a drone, and get microphones into hard-to-reach areas. Of course, using drones to study bird songs has an obvious drawback. “Excessive UAV noise is a major hurdle to using UAVs for bioacoustic monitoring, but we are optimistic that technological innovations to reduce motor and rotor noise will significantly reduce this issue,” the study reads. “We conclude that UAV-based bioacoustic monitoring holds great promise, and we urge other researchers to consider further experimentation to refine techniques.”