Unmanned aerial vehicles as a useful tool for investigating animal movements - samples

Determining animal abundance is crucial for assessing the effectiveness of management measures against pest animals. Meanwhile, investigating animal movements has become important for conducting abundance estimations of unmarked animals since the random encounter model (REM) was published. REM is a camera-trapping method that derives animal density by using contact ratio between camera-traps and targeted animals that randomly move at a certain speed in a given area. However, it requires an independent value, which is animal speed. For investigating animal speed, camera-traps with video recording and GPS tagging are the commonly used tools.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are currently used in wildlife monitoring to investigate the abundance of target species. It is evaluated as a tool that is non-invasive and suitable for surveys in inaccessible landscapes. Considering these characteristics, we regarded a distant survey using this technology as suitable for investigating animal movement...