Drones can do more than make things look good


When people buy drones, usually they're for taking videos of whatever they want or just to play around with. Many YouTubers use drones due to the fact that videos or photos that are taken on the drone are absolutely stunning, especially when you look at it in HD. Researchers at the University of Adelaide took advantage of this fact and applied it for something much more important than taking videos for the aesthetic. They decided to compare looking at and counting wildlife in person and looking at wildlife using images taken by drones. A few thousand rubber ducks were spread onto a beach and were counted by experienced wildlife spotters vs counting by drone images. The wildlife spotters were physically at the beach spotting the ducks using binoculars or telescopes. The drone images were counted by citizen scientists. They found that counting by drone gave a closer duck count to the actual duck count than being physically at the beach counting that way. They also included another experiment that involves a computer algorithm counting the ducks on the drone images, which was just as good as people counting the ducks on the images by hand.

What this means for wildlife experts is that they can count exactly how many animals are in the certain area using drones rather than being on the ground, which makes things much more convenient for scientists and is much more effective. The much bigger picture here is that scientists can monitor which animals are going through a decline or which animals are increasing. They can make moves and decisions on what to do for the wildlife. Extinction of animals can happen in an instant from the way that things are happening on the Earth. We want to try and preserve and save animals as much as we can before it is too late.

**LINK OF ARTICLE** : https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180213084417.htm

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