Exploration 9 - Jia Li He

In this video on TED talks, the speaker Lian Pin Koh talks about conservation drones. Lian Pin Koh is an environmental scientist that co-founded this idea to try to help gather information on forests and wildlife. He talks about how cheap this drone is with only four parts, the model aircraft, the autopilot, the payload (or camera) and the software. He tells us that each part are less than $500 and that the software is free (open source) so you could build a drone for less than $1500.

The main objective of building these drones are to go over forests and find out about wildlife. He talks about many benefits from having a drone because you could catch poachers from going into the forests, monitor forests and wildlife, it's easier than people walking around in the forests looking for the wildlife, monitoring agriculture, and the pictures could build a geometrically accurate 3D model of the landscape. He also mentions the idea that they could have WiFi signals to download pictures from camera traps that take pictures of any animals rather then have the biologists who use those camera traps go back into the forests and retrieve those cameras and there could be hundreds. Another idea is that the drones could find radio collars on animals that they track rather then be in the forests with a giant radio to find those animals they're tracking. The drones have began to become very popular, starting in Switzerland and Indonesia and spreading to many other countries like the United States.

This topic reminds me of the yahoo article I read before about how the U.S. might use drones to spy on people and how that was very controversial. I feel this is similar but more useful because I think this is a very interesting concept and that it could be useful in a lot of ways they mentioned in the video, however, I feel like it shouldn't stop biologists and others from going into the forests themselves completely because the drones are only a bird's eye view from the sky; there could be better information collected from the ground instead. I feel like, there might be a slight potential that poachers would grasp this idea of using drones for their own use to find where animals are and go kill them so this could actually be worse for wildlife when they're suppose to be helping them, depending on who has these drones. Overall, I think this is more beneficial than it hurts.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lian_pin_koh_a_drone_s_eye_view_of_conservation.html