Large drones make a big splash: Using smaller drones to conduct less disruptive wildlife surveys

Post provided by Kayla Kuhlmann

Hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus). Credit: Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez.

Ecologists have started looking into drones as new tools for wildlife surveys, but how can drone disturbance be minimized in order to produce accurate wildlife counts? In this post, Kayla Kuhlmann describes a drone practice to reduce disruption during acoustic bat surveys as featured in the paper “Miniaturization eliminates detectable impacts of drones on bat activity”, recently published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

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