ArticlePeerJ2016
Evaluation of unmanned aerial vehicle shape, flight path and camera type for waterfowl surveys: disturbance effects and species recognition.
Article in PeerJ, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Unmanned aircraft systems as a new source of disturbance for wildlife: A systematic review.PloS one · 2017Pooled it
- Waterbird zoogeochemical effects shape wetland nutrient dynamics and algal communities in Laurentian Great Lakes coastal freshwater wetlands.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- A Sampling-event Dataset from Aerial Surveys of Northern Eurasian Waterbirds, 2014-2024.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Environmental DNA monitoring of waterfowl reveals community changes during migration.PloS one · 2026Article
- Elephant habituation to drones as a behavioural observation tool.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- YOLO-WildASM: An Object Detection Algorithm for Protected Wildlife.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Best practice guidance for recreational and professional drones near colonial breeding birds.PloS one · 2025Article
- CECS-CLIP: Fusing Domain Knowledge for Rare Wildlife Detection Model.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- On the move: Influence of animal movements on count error during drone surveys.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Application of Artificial Intelligence and Sensor Fusion for Soil Organic Matter Prediction.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Monitoring Endangered and Rare Wildlife in the Field: A Foundation Deep Learning Model Integrating Human Knowledge for Incremental Recognition with Few Data and Low Cost.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Real-time biodiversity analysis using deep-learning algorithms on mobile robotic platforms.PeerJ. Computer science · 2023Article
- A colonial-nesting seabird shows no heart-rate response to drone-based population surveys.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Ensembles of data-efficient vision transformers as a new paradigm for automated classification in ecology.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Using piecewise regression to identify biological phenomena in biotelemetry datasets.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation.Nature communications · 2022Review
- Behavioral responses of blue-winged teal and northern shoveler to unmanned aerial vehicle surveys.PloS one · 2022Article
- Responses of turkey vultures to unmanned aircraft systems vary by platform.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Sociability strongly affects the behavioural responses of wild guanacos to drones.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Improving Animal Monitoring Using Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) and Deep Learning Networks.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for ecological research has grown rapidly in recent years, but few studies have assessed the disturbance impacts of these tools on focal subjects, particularly when observing easily disturbed species such as waterfowl. In this study we assessed the level of disturbance that a range of UAV shapes and sizes had on free-living, non-breeding waterfowl surveyed in two sites in eastern Australia between March and May 2015, as well as the capability of airborne digital imaging systems to provide adequate resolution for unambiguous species identification of these taxa. We found little or no obvious disturbance effects on wild, mixed-species flocks of waterfowl when UAVs were flown at least 60m above the water level (fixed wing models) or 40m above individuals (multirotor models). Disturbance in the form of swimming away from the UAV through to leaving the water surface and flying away from the UAV was visible at lower altitudes and when fixed-wing UAVs either approached subjects directly or rapidly changed altitude and/or direction near animals. Using tangential approach flight paths that did not cause disturbance, commercially available onboard optical equipment was able to capture images of sufficient quality to identify waterfowl and even much smaller taxa such as swallows. Our results show that with proper planning of take-off and landing sites, flight paths and careful UAV model selection, UAVs can provide an excellent tool for accurately surveying wild waterfowl populations and provide archival data with fewer logistical issues than traditional methods such as manned aerial surveys.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.