Wings for wildlife The use of conservation drones, challenges and opportunities

The idea of using low-cost do-it-yourself drones for conservation came in 2011 after two of us (Lian Pin Koh and Serge Wich) discussed the generally high financial and time investments that were made to monitor biodiversity in South East Asia. Particularly when surveying species such as orangutans (Pongo spp), it is costly and time-consuming to cover the entire distribution due to the relatively large geographic extent to which they occur and the fairly inhospitable terrain. Population data therefore rely on estimates, which are obtained by counting the number of nests within a small area and extrapolating these results to estimate the wider population (Ancrenaz et al. 2004; Wich et al. 2008). This means that the extent of data is limited and the frequency at which data are collected limited as well. Because orangutans make a new night nest on every night and these had been observed from manned helicopters and planes (Ancrenaz et al. 2004; Wich, pers. obs) we thought that perhaps drones could be used to obtain images of the forest canopy in which the nests could be detected. Because nobody had tried to take pictures of the canopy from drones to detect orangutan nests before, we were eager to test our idea and started to look for opportunities to obtain a drone that was affordable and could be repaired in the field. We quickly realised that it was best to build our own system based on resources available on the internet and components we could easily order via the internet (details below).