Advancing wildlife conservation: How UAVs and laser rangefinders are driving innovation 

UAVs and laser rangefinders in wildlife and conservation 

The illegal wildlife trade is valued at $20bn annually, driven by powerful market forces and commanding deep financial and technology resources. Evaluate that treat, and it’s clear that traditional wildlife and conservation management cannot counter or contain the illegal wildlife trade without using advanced technology.  

Habitat destruction and deforestation are other issues that wildlife and conservation professionals need to deal with. Global population growth and agricultural demands are deforesting wilderness areas, with the WWF estimating a loss of forest habitat at nearly 30m hectares a year.  

Wildlife and conservation management isn’t what you see in a documentary. The reality is often more heartbreaking and brutal as conservationists and rangers try to manage wildlife resources under threat.   

Laser rangefinders for forests 

Natural forests are precious in their role as wilderness habitats to carbon sinks. Canopy structure data is valuable for researchers and conservationists who must estimate a forest’s carbon cycling, hydrological processes, and ecosystem disturbance.  

Ground teams struggle to cover huge forest areas in a reasonable time, especially in isolated areas like the Amazon –the world’s most important carbon sink. Assessing and monitoring forest canopies in the Amazon, with its sheer tree size and environmental humidity, requires airborne solutions.  

UAVs featuring a laser rangefinder as part of their gimbal sensor payload help to assess tree canopy dimensions with accuracy and efficiency that ground teams can’t replicate. Laser rangefinders enhance depth perception accuracy when measuring tree canopy heights, especially compared to satellite imagery, which struggles to correct for gradients.  

To obtain the best possible data from the most isolated and sensitive forest areas, UAVs deliver the least invasive approach, with the laser rangefinder being a crucial sensor. A challenge working in the Amazon is deploying UAVss of a size and sensor capability that can fly close to such a complex forest canopy with agility – and penetrate it when required.  

 Tracking bird height for safer flight   

Offshore wind farms have transformed the European energy landscape toward sustainability but have also created collision risks for seabirds.  

Positioning windfarms in locations that reduce the risk of environmental impact for seabirds, requires accurate flight height data. When conservationists and windfarm planning teams know the true flight patterns of seabirds in a potentially high-yield windfarm area, they can make better decisions about collision risk.  

German researchers have successfully used laser rangefinders to track the flight heights of seabirds. This helps engineers better understand the likelihood of seabirds flying through the rotor-sweep zone of wind farm turbines.  

Closer ranges yield better accuracy for bird flight height tracking, making a case that rangefinders should be observing birds at ranges much closer than 1000m. By matching sensor capability to ranging needs, avian research teams can avoid deploying large and expensive UAVs, with laser rangefinder capabilities way in excess of what they need.   

The weakness of large UAVs and anti-poaching  

Rhinos are the most prized animals for poachers, with more than 10,000 African rhinos lost over the last decades. The statistics are devastating for a species without natural predators and a low birthrate.  

South Africa is home to most of the world’s rhino population and the renowned Kruger Park, similar in size to the State of New Jersey. With losses exceeding more than a rhino per day during severe waves of poaching, South African anti-poaching teams use all available technologies.  

The first anti-poaching drone deployments in Kruger Park during the early to mid-2010s weren’t successful. Large UAVs were used, which required complicated logistics support and prepared take-off zones, limiting their deployment points throughout the vast Kruger Park. For effective anti-poaching intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), teams in Africa have learned that being stealthy, agile, and interconnected is crucial.  

Traditional airborne wildlife and conservation work – animal counting and herding – isn’t primarily a nighttime mission. For anti-poaching operations in Kruger Park, the need developed for UAVs that excel at low altitude nighttime work, at detection distances closer than 1000m. 

Large UAVs require more complex maintenance, are costly to operate and can be challenging for inexperience pilots to operate. Compact UAVs with laser rangefinders operating between 250- to 1000m have all the capabilities needed for real-world anti-poaching operations while being easier to deploy and manage for wildlife teams and rangers who aren’t elite-level drone pilots.  

 Imagining better UAVs for rhino conservation   

The dense African bush makes point-to-point patrol movement exhausting for ground teams, and animal confrontations with herds of elephants, hippos or lions increase the risks for anti-poaching rangers.  

Ground teams can’t waste time being dispatched to a general area without precise coordinates. Real-time location data and coordination are everything in anti-poaching, creating the need for compact and interconnected UAVs with a gimbal sensor payload that includes moderate-distance laser rangefinders.  

For anti-poaching operations, stealth is crucial. On a deathly quiet night in the African bush, poachers are hypersensitive to any sound, like a large UAV operating at low altitude. The stealthiness of compact UAVs allow them to remain close to poachers that have been identified, without being detected.  

When the location coordinates confirmed by an ISR drone’s laser rangefinder have been shared with a ground team, the drone must remain on station to observe and provide real-time movement updates. And doing that stealthily ensures complete surprise when a ground team finally intercepts the poachers.  

The South African experience in Kruger Park highlights that anti-poaching operations can be served by a compact, easy-to-operate UAV, with a mid-range laser rangefinder optimized for real-world detection and interception distances between 250- and 1000m.  

 Moderate range matters 

UAVs are a powerful part of the wildlife and conservation toolkit because it is vital to observe without disturbing.  

From Amazon canopy assessments to African Rhino conservation and tracking bird flight heights, most wildlife and conservation UAV needs are at much closer detection ranges than generally assumed. This creates a need for compact UAVs equipped with mid-range laser rangefinders, more appropriate in size for navigating close to towering Amazonian forest canopies or stealthily tracking rhino poachers.  

Mid-range laser rangefinders deliver the depth and detection capabilities that make sense in the Amazon, African bush and tracking seabird flight paths through offshore wind farms. The question for wildlife and conservation UAV users, is how the market will respond regarding the mid-range laser rangefinders they need.