There’s something inherently creepy and annoying about drones buzzing over our heads — a frequent backyard irritation in cities like New York. But it turns out, a drone’s spying abilities can be useful: an uncrewed drone discovered a super-rare plant on a steep cliff on the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi. The discovery wowed botanists — and shows how technology can help conservationists in their fight against extinction.
“We were really excited,” says Ben Nyberg, a GIS specialist and lead drone pilot at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, a nonprofit institution charted by US Congress in 1964. Nyberg was flying the drone that found the plants at NTBG’s 1,000-acre Limahuli preserve.
The 1,000-acre Limahuli preserve on the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi.
Photo by Alessandra Potenza / The Verge
“It’s amazing how much of a game changer this is for field botanists,” Merlin Edmonds, a conservationist at NTBG, said in a statement. Edmonds was training to be a drone pilot with Nyberg when the plants were spotted. “Discovering a population like this would usually take days of searching under life-threatening conditions, but this happened in 20 minutes.”
Drones are frequently used in conservation. In Africa, drones are deployed to catch poachers slaying endangered elephants and rhinos — especially at night, when they’re most active but harder to see. The same is happening in Nepal, where poachers target elephants, rhinos, and tigers. The vehicles are also used to study river dolphins in the Amazon, as well as orangutans in Indonesia.