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A new scientific approach to counting wildlife has discovered 41,000 nesting turtles hidden in an Amazon area.
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A team of the University of Florida believes that they have developed a more accurate way of monitoring wildlife with the help of drones and statistical modeling.
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The countdown of wildlife is wildly inaccurate with the current methods, according to the study of researchers.
Researchers at the University of Florida have developed a new process for counting animals. A new method of researching the pairing of drones with intelligent modeling reports more than 41,000 endangered giant South American river turtles that nest along the Guapore River of the Amazon, according to researchers behind a recent study. This is the biggest known aggregation of freshwater turtles in the world.
This process – removed in the study published in Applied Ecology Magazine –involves taking thousands of images to track and study animal behavior to eliminate errors made by other methods, such as countdown.
The leading author of the Ismail Marine-Doctoral Study at the School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatic Sciences PhD at the University of Florida and Agricultural Sciences, by drawing the Roman method and clarified in a statement that the method can count much more beings than only to turtles.
The team has partnered with the Society for the Protection of Wildlife in Brazil, Colombia and Bolivia to test the method, essentially conducting an endangered turtle. These elusive reptiles are extremely social animals, and females gather annually to nest in the sandy shores of the Guapore River between Brazil and Bolivia during the summer months.
In the past, the scientist used drones and relied on what was known as the orthomosaic strategy (sewing up hundreds of overlapping air photos) to count the turtles, as it was a faster and less invasive approach than the number of Earth. Although common, the study explains that style is the subject of discovery errors, which are often overlooked, and fights to account for movement during observations.
In the new study, the team uses white paint to mark the shells of 1187 turtles. The drone flew over the head on a planned path four times a day for 12 days to take 1500 photos of each pass. The scientists then sew the photos together by recording the path of each turtle marked, showing where it is built and where it went. This information allowed researchers to create likelihood models that take into account the movement of turtles, all based on the behavior seen.
According to the study, traditional orthomosaic based are shown to be wildly inaccurate, as well as the number taken only from Earth. New behavior modeling has revealed that only 45 percent of turtles using the sand bank are present during drone flights, and approximately 20 percent of the observed walking is repeatedly counted (some of them are reported up to seven times).
The inconsistencies have led to Earth observers who evaluate that the site contains 16,000 turtles, and observers using the orthomosaic drone strategy (without modeling) have counted 79,000 turtles. When applying the new modeling based on motion, the team estimated the presence of about 41,000 turtles.
“These numbers vary greatly and this is a problem for environmentalists,” Marriage said. “If scientists are unable to establish the right number of individuals of one kind, how will they understand if the population is in decline or whether the efforts to protect it are successful?”
In order for the plan to work, scientists need to understand the patterns of animal movement that may require the hair of seal cutting using high -visibility ecakes or marking mountain goats with pellets for Peyland pellets to name a few examples. The study states that the counting of animals, when populations are spatially aggregated – for example, both during reproduction or nesting – interferes with the accuracy and efficiency of the efforts to study.
The team plans to improve the process by focusing on turtles in other countries in South America. “By combining information from numerous studies,” said Marriage, “We can find trends in the population and society for wildlife protection will know where to invest in conservation actions.”
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