Abstract
Biodiversity monitoring is crucial in tackling defaunation in the Anthropocene, particularly in tropical ecosystems. However, field surveys are often limited by habitat complexity, logistical constraints, financing and detectability. Hence, leveraging drones technology for species monitoring is required to overcome the caveats of conventional surveys. We investigated prospective methods for wildlife monitoring using drones in four ecosystems. We surveyed waterbird populations in Pulau Rambut, a community of ungulates in Baluran and endemic non-human primates in Gunung Halimun-Salak, Indonesia in 2021 using a DJI Matrice 300 RTK and DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual with additional thermal sensors. We then, consecutively, implemented two survey methods at three sites to compare the efficacy of drones against traditional ground survey methods for each species. The results show that drone surveys provide advantages over ground surveys, including precise size estimation, less disturbance and broader area coverage. Moreover, heat signatures helped to detect species which were not easily spotted in the radiometric imagery, while the detailed radiometric imagery allowed for species identification. Our research also demonstrates that machine learning approaches show a relatively high performance in species detection. Our approaches prove promising for wildlife surveys using drones in different ecosystems in tropical forests.
Highlights
Academic Editor: Eben BroadbentThe tropical rainforest is one of the most complex ecosystems
The results obtained from this study demonstrate the capability and benefits of drone surveys for detailed monitoring of all water birds that inhabit the island during the monitoring period, and its applicability can be used to provide an overview of long-term waterbird population trends
Due to the high and wide point of view, in our study, drones overcame some of the complex habitat-related visibility problems of surveying focal animals inhabiting tropical forests
Summary
The tropical rainforest is one of the most complex ecosystems. It is a vital ecosystem, which acts as a biodiversity fortress and provides crucial ecosystem services such as raw materials (e.g., timber and non-timber forest products), soil protection, carbon sequestration and watershed protection [1–3]. Despite representing the largest reservoir of biodiversity with a rich diversity of flora (>200 plant species/hectare) [4,5] and fauna Of the world’s animal species) [6] and its various functionalities, most tropical rainforests, including those situated in Indonesia, are lost or degraded through human intervention over time. Biological diversity in Indonesia is the second greatest globally, and Indonesia has the third-largest area of tropical rainforest [7], with a span of 94.1 million ha of forest in 2019 [8]. Indonesia comprises only 1.3% of the Earth’s surface, it houses about 15% of its species richness [7,10]
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