Whale Watchers

How drones are transforming marine research

- Dr. Iain Kerr

I recently watched the video Moonshots and Why They Matter by Peter Diamandis, and I encourage you to watch it too. He says that most companies, start-ups, and entrepreneurs try to achieve a 10 percent annual increase of product by working harder or smarter. A “moonshot” is when your goal is to achieve 10 times that, and to do that, you have to approach the problem differently. As far as I am concerned, the drone world is now prime real estate for moonshot thinking, especially if you direct that thinking toward environmental or species conservation.

There are currently 41,415 animal, plant, and fungi species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, and 16,306 are threatened with extinction. If you add to that the fact that 71 percent of Earth is covered with water, I see enormous opportunities here for developing and using drones for good. When I go to drone conferences, I see many adaptations for terrestrial problems but very few for ocean and wildlife conservation—oceans that are critical to humanity’s survival.

Alas, part of the reason we know so little about our oceans is because oceanography has long been a prerogative of the privileged. The standard model of using big research vessels that cost upward of $20,000 a day is not something that many countries, let alone many nonprofits, can afford, but many of the drones that are available to us today are affordable, replicable, and field­ and user­friendly.

I see at least three drone environmental moonshot categories worth exploring here:

- New ocean-monitoring (conservation and biology) and data-collection tools

- Better ways of managing collected environmental data in real time (think: artificial intelligence)

- Better ways to engage and educate people about environmental problems