Conservation drones: cute toys or serious science?

There is a certain amount of buzz around drones at the moment - check these links to get the idea:

Conservation drone project
Conservation Drone - Mongabay
Rhino poacher vs google drone
The Guardian - ecology drones

Made (in)famous through their use in conflict zones and counter terrorist operations, they are now being widely applied to the field of conservation. We have had our eye on them for a little while and with a bit of end-of-year leftover budget we should be able to get our hands on one.

This morning we made our way down to Wakehurst Place to test out the SenseFly eBee. It was a cold, grey morning and the wind was at the limit of the eBee's recommended tolerance -  a good day for a test then! 

The SenseFly eBee getting - GPS ready and waiting for flight plan

Unlike pilot controlled models,  the course of the eBee is set through software on a handheld tablet pc. Enter your area of interest and altitude and as soon as the GPS is ready, you are good to go.

A standard compact camera is embedded in the drone and it takes images automatically as it works its way up and down the area of interest through a series of back and forth flights paths. In a matter of minutes the drone had finished its job and was circling above our heads preparing to land. Maybe it was the gusty wind or the tufty grass, we're not sure, but it took a bit of a tumble on the landing.

There is a bit of post processing needed to stitch the images together and rectify them, but nothing too onerous. All very neat stuff, but how exactly are the drones useful for our work? We have several ideas where they may come in useful. For example, single species monitoring. Some plants can be identified quite well from aerial imagery and the drone allows a rapid survey at relatively low cost (compared to purchasing high resolution satellite imagery). It could also be used for rapid vegetation survey for small to medium sized areas e.g 10 - 50 square kilometers. It also could be a powerful monitoring tool used to detect changes - you can very easily return to the same area over and over again and then analyse the images to see what has changed.

As it turns, out the first use will probably be in Peru where we have a project that requires cows to be counted to look at the impact they are having on the vegetation. So, maybe they will live up to the hype - the sky is the limit!

Building a plant conservation assessment triage - baby steps

On the subject of endangered species, plants don't quite get the same level of attention as the fluffy, furry and feathered mammals and birds. However, they are endangered and they are important. Plants provide us with food, shelter, construction materials, medicine and an almost unquantifiable cultural value. On top of that they provide ecosystem services; those less than obvious supporting functions that help to keep the planet (and humankind) in a reasonably stable state. We've only just started to quantify the economic value of these services, but it no doubt goes into trillions of dollars - see TEEB for more details.

Recent new discoveries of plant species from around the world

Ok. That is the 'why you should care' bit. Now, let's look at the state of knowledge on threat status of plants. According to the foremost source on extinction risk of organisms, the IUCN Red List registers approximately 5% of plants. Whichever way you look at it, that is hardly a representative view of extinction risk in plants. An alternative approach using a random (and therefore representative) sample of plants suggested around 1 in 5 plants could be threatened. Of course the true picture won't be revealed until all plants are assessed and the total estimated (we don't know exactly!) number of plant taxa is around 380,000. At the present rate it would take a few hundred years before that can be achieved.

Results from the Sampled Red List Index for Plants indicating about 1 in 5 plants could be threatened with extinction

So that, in a roundabout way, gets us up-to-date. We need a mechanism to fast-track some plant species for inclusion on the Red List otherwise they will go extinct before we get around to assessing them. One way to do this is to adopt a triage approach. A triage is basically a quick way of ranking a large number of items into a small number of groups so that effort can be prioritised. It is often used in medical emergency situations. By applying a triage to plants we can identify those most likely to be threatened, not threatened or lacking enough data to judge. Those that we group as threatened should be priorities for further work and full Red List assessment.

So what will drive the triage? Amazingly, if you scour the literature you will see there is no shortage of evidence based threat assessments of plants. Although not full IUCN Red List level assessments they may be the best that is known about a particular taxon and are therefore extremely valuable.
Over the next year or so I plan to gather together and compile all these assessments into a single resource so that we have a powerful baseline of information from which we can inform further effort. In this blog I'll keep you posted on progress with this project along with any interesting developments in the world of endangered plants. Better get cracking then....