Drones and AI used to monitor Alderney’s gannet colonies

Friday, 20 September 2024 07:15

The Alderney Wildlife Trust is modernising the way it monitors its offshore gannets, thanks to a collaboration with Oxford Brookes University.

The gannet colonies of Les Etacs and Ortac are some of the first in the world to be fully surveyed with drones and numbers of birds counted using Artificial Intelligence.

Researchers hope this will help them understand how the birds are recovering from an outbreak of Avian Flu in 2022 - which is thought to have caused a 29% decline in breeding pairs.

Trust Ecologist, Dr Tara Cox, says the previous counting method took a long time and was therefore only carried out every 5 years.

"Previously we used an aeroplane, circling the gannetries with someone taking photographs with a camera.

Then we would have multiple ecologists review the images and manually count the birds. It would take hours and hours.

With a drone you can fly out and take multiple high quality images and then put them through AI software. Within a minute you have all the gannets counted. It is amazing."

The drone-assisted census is also considered more cost-effective, replicable, and environmentally friendly.

The data gathered by the Seabird Watch Project will be published in the annual Ramsar Review later this year.