IHE Delft 💧 Drones and dragons - using drones to detect dragonflies
Channel: IHE Delft Institute for Water Education
Date: 2017-12-07

Postdoc Researcher John Simaika is an expert in dragonflies and Senior Lecturer Paolo Paron is an expert on drones. They met in Tanzania doing fieldwork. Their combined expertise resulted in a research project proposal that will monitor dragonfly populations using drones, enabling them to measure the water quality of difficult to reach African wetlands.

Dragonflies are important indicators of wetland health, and there is a huge need to develop their use in African wetlands, which are high in biodiversity and human use.

Dragonflies are large insects, that are relatively easy to spot and to identify in the field. They are excellent indicators of water quality and recognized indicators of freshwater health.

Monitoring the health of wetlands is a vital part of assessing the impact of existing and planned future infrastructures. This can be an expensive and time-consuming process. As a consequence, monitoring is either not done regularly or not done at all.

To make monitoring faster, cheaper and more accessible to citizen scientists, we propose a novel method that combines state-of-the-art technology represented by drone footage and image recognition with traditional entomology to detect key species of dragonflies, as indicators of ecosystem health, in drone videos and images.

We will also test crowd-sourced data collection through a web-based application that will multiply the number and frequency of sampling points engaging citizen scientists in regular monitoring.