Abstract
AbstractAerial drones are increasingly being used as tools for ecological research and wildlife monitoring in hard-to-access study systems, such as in studies of colonial-nesting birds. Despite their many advantages over traditional survey methods, there remains concerns about possible disturbance effects that standard drone survey protocols may have on bird colonies. There is a particular gap in the study of their influence on physiological measures of stress. We measured heart rates of incubating female common eider ducks (Somateria mollissima) to determine whether our drone-based population survey affected them. To do so, we used heart-rate recorders placed in nests to quantify their heart rate in response to a quadcopter drone flying transects 30 m above the nesting colony. Eider heart rate did not change from baseline (measured in the absence of drone survey flights) by a drone flying at a fixed altitude and varying horizontal distances from the bird. Our findings suggest that carefully planned drone-based surveys of focal species have the potential to be carried out without causing physiological impacts among colonial-nesting eiders.
Funder
Canadian Wildlife Service
Wildlife Research Division of Environment and Climate Change Canada
Nunavut Arctic College
Polar Continental Shelf Project
Northern Scientific Training Program
ArcticNet
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference91 articles.
1. Ratcliffe, N. et al. A protocol for the aerial survey of penguin colonies using UAVs. J. Unmanned Veh. Syst. 3, 95–101 (2015).
2. Albores-Barajas, Y. V. et al. A new use of technology to solve an old problem: Estimating the population size of a burrow nesting seabird. PLoS ONE 13, 1–15 (2018).
3. Rush, G. P., Clarke, L. E., Stone, M. & Wood, M. J. Can drones count gulls? Minimal disturbance and semiautomated image processing with an unmanned aerial vehicle for colony-nesting seabirds. Ecol. Evol. 8, 12322–12334 (2018).
4. Chabot, D., Craik, S. R. & Bird, D. M. Population census of a large Common tern colony with a small unmanned aircraft. PLoS ONE 10, 1–14 (2015).
5. McClelland, G. T. W., Bond, A. L., Sardana, A. & Glass, T. Rapid population estimate of a surface-nesting seabird on a remote island using a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle. Mar. Ornithol. 44, 215–220 (2016).
Cited by
7 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献