When it comes to monitoring and studying wildlife, conservationists have several key requirements for their technology. It should be relatively cheap and easy to operate, easily transportable and, above all, it should cause minimal disruption to the animals and areas being surveyed. Drones tick all those boxes.
Natural England in Norfolk
In December 2024, a team of specialists from Natural England launched a drone over the beach at Winterton-on-Sea in Norfolk. Instance segmentation, a type of artificial intelligence (AI), was then used to automatically detect individual seals from the drone imagery and distinguish between adult seals and whitecoat pups, even when grouped closely together. The survey identified more than 8,500 seals along an 8km stretch of shoreline, in contrast to a volunteer-led ground count which recorded just 6,200 seals.
