Using Drones for Large Mammal Monitoring

Introduction The emergence of drones has profoundly transformed the field of large mammal monitoring, offering unprecedented capabilities for data collection on both terrestrial and aquatic species but challenges remain for data collection and analyses. Aims In this Practice Insights article we provide a succinct review of drone types, their sensors and main applications to monitor large terrestrial mammals. We focus on obtaining key ecological metrics through using drones: presence/absence, population density and overall abundance, including spatial distribution. We also review machine learning efforts to automate animal detection and tracking, as well as the statistical methods to estimate animal density. Methods We provide a new method to determine animal locations from RGB videos obtained with drones. The geolocation method shows promising results with an accuracy of between 1.58 and 3.1 m on a small test sample, which is an improvement over those from crewed aircraft. Discussion Challenges for drone usage in terms of data collection and analyses remain but both are becoming increasingly more user friendly. There are still challenges such as the lack of open‐source deep learning models to detect mammals and classify them but we expect this to be solved in the coming years. In addition the analytical workflows to move from such detections and classifications will likely become more user friendly as well.