TY - JOUR T1 - Drones count wildlife more accurately and precisely than humans JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/165019 SP - 165019 AU - Jarrod C. Hodgson AU - Rowan Mott AU - Shane M. Baylis AU - Trung T. Pham AU - Simon Wotherspoon AU - Adam D. Kilpatrick AU - Ramesh Raja Segaran AU - Ian Reid AU - Aleks Terauds AU - Lian Pin Koh Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/18/165019.abstract N2 - Ecologists are increasingly using technology to improve the quality of data collected on wildlife, particularly for assessing the environmental impacts of human activities. Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS; commonly known as ‘drones’) are widely touted as a cost-effective way to collect high quality wildlife population data, however, the validity of these claims is unclear. Using life-sized seabird colonies containing a known number of replica birds, we show that RPAS-derived data are, on average, between 43% and 96% more accurate than data from the traditional ground-based collection method. We also demonstrate that counts from this remotely sensed imagery can be semi-automated with a high degree of accuracy. The increased accuracy and precision of RPAS-derived wildlife monitoring data provides greater statistical power to detect fine-scale population fluctuations allowing for more informed and proactive ecological management. ER -