Eyes in the sky usher in new era for monitoring animal diversity, numbers, and movement
Drones and satellites radically change the game in forestalling the worst in animal declines and species extinctions. Key to wildlife conservation is just getting the facts—and there are a lot of facts to get when it comes to the complexity of the natural world. Without accurate and comprehensive information on what is actually happening on the ground, prioritizing and designing conservation efforts are mostly guesswork. Such is the growing enormity of human impacts on the biosphere, research methods must scale up, or fall behind the accelerating pace of change.
How best to scale up is with devices that can remotely gather vast amounts of data on both groups and individuals—seeing both the forest and the trees. The best positioning for these devices is up in the sky, and their primary data-gathering methods are electronic.*
Fortunately, remote sensing of this kind has embarked on a golden age with the advent of drone and satellite technology to observe, count, and follow animals on a scale undreamt-of by heretofore earthbound researchers.
Drones count
Australian researchers have found drones more accurate in counting individual animals than with traditional methods. Accurate counts are vital to detecting small changes in numbers of animals, and, as Jarrod Hodgson, leader of the Australian research effort put it, “Accurate monitoring can detect small changes in animal numbers. That is important because if we had to wait for a big shift in those numbers to notice the decline, it might be too late to conserve a threatened species.” In other words, anticipate the tipping point before it tips.
For the CNN report on the drone research, see Drones making the grade
Satellites as noninvasive, big-picture observers
Jarrod Hodgson, quoted in the Drone section above, cautioned that more research was needed to improve protocols to minimize impact on wildlife—many animals notice drones, too, even though they are much quieter than planes or helicopters.** He says, quoted in the CNN report, “[Developing noninvasive protocols] is particularly important for species that are prone to disturbance and where traditional [ground-based] methods involving close proximity to species are not possible or desirable.”
Noninvasive data-gathering is a cinch for satellites. They have the capability of following movements over great distances, particularly in bird and insect migrations. Such is the mission of ICARUS—the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, headed by Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.
Wikelski describes ICARUS as a “global collaboration of research scientists that are interested in life on the globe.” He claims that “once we put together all the information on mobile animals, then we’ll have a completely different and new understanding of life on Earth.” (The information will be compiled in a publicly accessible database.)
Collaborator Walter Jetz at Yale says, “the system represents a quantum leap for the study of animal movements and migration, and will enable real-time biodiversity monitoring at a global scale.”
What’s the trick? Solar-powered transmitters attached to animals on the Earth’s surface, and far above, giant antennae to be mounted on the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS orbits our planet 16 times a day, and tracks over the same area on the ground approximately every three days.*** ICARUS engineers are designing devices small enough to tag and track songbirds, and even insects!
(We trust that the high ambitions of the ICARUS folks will not run afoul of the kind of misadventure that took down the mythical Icarus. It’s a marvelous coincidence that at the same time ICARUS is getting off the ground, we have just fired a probe at the Sun which will skirt the corona at temperatures of millions of degrees Celsius.)
For a distillation of the ICARUS mission reported by Kevin Dickinson on Big Think’s website, check out: Big Think thinks about ICARUS
On the website phys.org, we read of ICARUS getting “an unprecedented extraterrestrial perspective on the lives of some of Earth’s smallest and most mobile creatures, such as fruit bats, baby turtles, parrots, and songbirds.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-space-based-tracker-scientists-beyond-bird-eye-view-wildlife.html#jCp
Big picture, small beasts—the ones that count the most
The most amazing, and perhaps most important use of tracking by satellite, is following the movements of insects. Because of the variety of their forms and behaviors, the variety of habitats they occupy, the quantity of ecological services they perform, their value as prey, and their sheer numbers, insects can tell us more about biodiversity and climate change than any other class of land animals. The collapse of flying insect populations in Germany, announced in 2017, was an ominous signal that the damage we are doing to the environment may be far bigger than many of us have already suspected. Let’s count on those ingenious designers to come up with tracking devices small enough to tag insects, pronto!
Dave Goulson, one of the co-authors of the insect study in Germany, said, “If we were to lose the insects, we would lose most of our crops, we would lose all the flowers from the countryside, and we’d lose most of the bird life, the mammal life, and so on, So essentially we’re talking about complete catastrophe for [land-based] life on Earth.”
Goulson can be forgiven for a little hyperbole, since he turns out to be a specialist in the ecology and conservation of bumblebees.† The probability of losing all insects is pretty small, but losing a host of key species would definitely be catastrophic, if not completely so (losing ants alone would be close to catastrophic).
For more in the report on insect decline in Germany, see Steep declines in German flying insect populations
For a look at the source article in PLOS One that sounded the alarm, check out Research detail on insect decline
The paradox of technology shows up wherever we have a big global problem.
In global wildlife monitoring we have another example of high technology being used combat the damage wrought by crude technology. Where we and wildlife go from here depends on what set of tools we prefer to use—those of extraction and exploitation of resources, or those of information and intercommunication with our wild cousins.
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* Aliens monitoring us will almost certainly be using sensors throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, not just in the visual frequencies. (“Visual frequencies” is relative; mantis shrimp can detect far more colors than can people, and many birds and most insects can “see” ultraviolet frequencies invisible to us. Toward the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum, mosquitoes use thermal sensors to help find prey). What will they (the aliens, not mantis shrimp or mosquitoes) make of radio, TV, YouTube, and social media? They might begin to ask themselves “What were we thinking when we believed this was intelligent life?”
** I am reminded of an anecdote concerning Secretariat, who was once observed looking up at a distant plane passing overhead. The teller of the anecdote, a long-time devotee of horse racing (and huge Secretariat fan), said he had never seen another horse do the same. It’s my guess that wild horses react similarly. Tame horses, cocooned within artificial surroundings, have less need for alertness—the unconcern from people hanging around may persuade them that planes are harmless. (When I ride past cows or horses on my bicycle, the young ones often get spooked, while the adults continue to graze uninterruptedly. Horses are more responsive than cows, but their stare often seems to convey disdain for machine-assisted travel.)
*** For a NASA tutorial on the ISS orbits, see:
ISS orbit behavior
† Bumble bees receive rave reviews from ecologists for their pollination services. But their value is often overlooked, because unlike honeybees, they nest in hives of mere scores or hundreds rather than of thousands—left in the dust by honey bees in the commercial pollination and honey businesses. Like many wild insects, they are under threat from habitat loss, pesticides, climate change, and introduced diseases. It’s unfortunate that the news of their plight has been muffled by the din over honey bees, because commercial, non-native honey bees may be one of the chief carriers of disease to wild bumble bees. Native North American bumble bees are imperiled by managed bees, whose numbers have soared thanks to the imports demanded by industrial agriculture, and with the imports have come diseases that can spread to native bees. For more on this neglected threat to biodiversity (not to mention the adorable cuteness of bumble bees), see: Bees you know are killing the ones you don’t
For a bumble bee bonus, check out this short and to-the-point piece from the National Wildlife Federation: 5 facts about bumble bees