Modified drones are keeping an eye on the world’s wildlife

For more than a year, Michael Moore has been trying to capture the breath of whales.

It’s an audacious idea, but Moore has help. A marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, he’s rigged a fleet of small unmanned aerial vehicles—UAVs, or drones—with samplers to catch whales’ exhalations from above. The aim is to get a good enough sample to analyze exhaled microbes and gain a better understanding of the cetaceans’ health.

Of course, stores don’t typically sell “whale breath-catching drones” off the shelf. Moore’s team has to make a number of adjustments to adapt his UAVs for the task at hand: setting them to calibrate on flat land so their gyros aren’t affected by the rocking boat, and moving the sample-catching petri dish from the bottom of the drone to the top.

“You’re using a down-drafting device to sample an updraft,” he explains. “Inherently, you’re asking it to do something it wasn’t designed to do.”

Moore, who hopes to get his first microbial analysis later this year, is one of many scientists now harnessing UAVs for wildlife conservation and research. Using drones, one team recently discovered that there were twice as many orangutans in Sumatra as previously thought. UAVs have also been employed to map map Arctic shrubs, monitor wildlife in a Dubai national park, and even track down poachers in India. All it takes is a little engineering and ingenuity.

DIY droning

The availability of reliable, off-the-shelf UAVs has made standard aerial surveillance far easier than it used to be, but drones don’t come out of the box ready for the kinds of projects conservationists throw at them. That means researchers like Moore are increasingly using do-it-yourself modification techniques to prepare small drones for the unique aspects of tracking wildlife in sometimes harsh environments. Multi-spectral cameras, for example, allow drones see across a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum, making it possible to analyze vegetation types in addition to animal life.

Serge Wich, a professor in the school of natural sciences and psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, and part of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program, co-founded a group called Conservation Drones along with collaborator Lian Pin Koh at the University of Adelaide in Australia. The organization works exclusively on finding ingenious ways to modify UAVs for wildlife uses.