http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=638
Anza Borrego State Park has herds of Big Horn Sheep, they are monitored with radio collars. There are motion activated cameras at some watering holes.
Maybe drones could lessen the use of radio collars, allow the early discovery of lamb carcasses for forensics.
What do you think?
Replies
Chief difficulties to overcome that I can see are these:
1. Very low density of bighorns on the landscape - have to cover hundreds to thousands of acres to find one, or a couple, animals, Current "low-end" UAVs don't yet have the endurance to effectively monitor free-ranging ungulates (which, in desert landscapes, can disperse over many thousands of hectares), except for covering concentration areas (like water sources), but in the case of bighorns, even those locations tend to be widely dispersed and not attract many animals with much frequency.
2. Natural color camouflage/small size relative to landscape features, making their detection difficult in color images, even at high resolution.
3. Rugged topography of bighorn habitat in the Anza-Borrego. Both a hazard to operating the vehicles (updrafts/downdrafts and obstacles), and would produce a range of variation in the resolution of targets observed in the resulting imagery - from hilltops to toe-slopes covering some hundreds of feet sometimes.
There are solutions to these things, but addressing them all together would not be simple. I and some other faculty at my institution are planning to begin flight testing FLIR (thermal imaging) systems on small UAVs to develop specific recommendations, for using them for monitoring pastured livestock and wildlife. But first results are a year or more out. Bighorns wouldn't be my first choice of a target, necessarily, but there would be a lot of useful things learned in the exercise. One of my students set up game cameras at multiple water sources used by a population of bighorns on the east side of Riverside County this last summer, hoping the summer heat would increase their visitations to local springs. Several months of monitoring produced images of three or four animals, I think.
Have you read Joe Noci's postings here? His are particularly useful, and well-informed.