What are Conservation Drones?

Conservation Drones are inexpensive, autonomous and operator-friendly unmanned aerial vehicles for surveying and mapping forests and biodiversity. Non-technical operators can program each mission by defining waypoints along a flight path using an open-source software.

Our Conservation Drones are able to fly pre-programmed missions autonomously for a total flight time of up to ~50 minutes and over a distance of ~25 km. Depending on the camera system installed, these drones can record videos at up to 1080 pixel resolution, and acquire aerial photographs of <10 cm pixel resolution. Aerial photographs can be stitched together to produce near real-time geo-referenced land use/cover maps of surveyed areas.

We believe that Conservation Drones have great potential for environmental and conservation applications, which include near real-time mapping of local land cover, monitoring of illegal forest activities, and surveying of large animal species.

Disclaimer: The Conservation Drones team (Lian Pin Koh and Serge Wich) strives to develop Conservation Drones that are operationally stable and safe. However, we have no control over the operation of Conservation Drones by our collaborators. And therefore, the Conservation Drones Team will be not held liable for any bodily harm and/or property damage resulting from the operation of Conservation Drones by third parties, including our collaborators.