312 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
whether the new approach is more cost-efficient than traditional methods at
providing the information (e.g. population trends) required for management.
This is particularly true when the new method relies on an expensive piece of
equipment.● (^) In such a comparison, remember that the price of new technology tends to
decrease rapidly: what does not seem cost-effective today could very well be
tomorrow.
● (^) Technology could also allow the collection of new types of data that provide
more in-depth inference.
● (^) When changing a monitoring method, consider potential issues of back-
compatibility with previous data, particularly in long-term monitoring
programs.
● (^) Keep in mind practical constraints for deployment (e.g. ‘Can I legally f ly a
drone over this area? How will I provide power to the devices?’).
● (^) Keep in mind new challenges (e.g. with drones, issues of privacy and impact
on wildlife) and unexpected issues (e.g. raptors attacking drones; primer
specificity with eDNA sampling).
References
Anderson K, Gaston KJ (2013) Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles will revolution-
ize spatial ecology. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11 , 138–146.
doi:10.1890/120150
Banks JC, Demetras NJ, Hogg ID, Knox MA, West DW (2016) Monitoring brown trout
(Salmo trutta) eradication in a wildlife sanctuary using environmental DNA. New
Zealand Natural Sciences 41 , 1–13.
Biggs J, Ewald N, Valentini A, Gaboriaud C, Dejean T, Griffiths RA, Foster J, et al.
(2015) Using eDNA to develop a national citizen science-based monitoring pro-
gramme for the great crested newt (Triturus cristatus). Biological Conservation 183 ,
19–28. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2014.11.029
Brown EA, Chain FJJ, Zhan A, MacIsaac HJ, Cristescu ME (2016) Early detection of
aquatic invaders using metabarcoding reveals a high number of non-indigenous
species in Canadian ports. Diversity & Distributions 22 , 1045–1059.
Christie KS, Gilbert SL, Brown CL, Hatfield M, Hanson L (2016) Unmanned aircraft
systems in wildlife research: current and future applications of a transformative
technology. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14 , 241–251. doi:10.1002/
fee.1281
Dell AI, Bender JA, Branson K, Couzin ID, de Polavieja GG, Noldus LPJJ, et al. (2014)
Automated image-based tracking and its application in ecology. Trends in Ecology
& Evolution 29 , 417–428. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2014.05.004
Gonzalez LF, Montes GA, Puig E, Johnson S, Mengersen K, Gaston KJ (2016)
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and artificial intelligence revolutionizing wildlife
monitoring and conservation. Sensors 16 , 97. doi:10.3390/s16010097