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.*