Bringing technology to our side – the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to help marine conservation

Unthinkable technologies – or thinkable only in Hollywood – have been emerging rapidly in the last decades. One incredible example and recently spread are drones. Drones are unmanned aerial devices that make a noise similar to drones, the male bee. Drones were originally created as a strategic war artifact, but now they have all kinds of applications, formats, and sizes. Some are so tiny that fit in your hand (Fig 1). 

Fig. 1. You can fit a drone in your hand.
Source: http://www.webdechollos.com/

Drones are polemic objects because they were originally created for military purposes. The USA has surveyed and attacked Afghanistan and Iraq using drones. In fact drones have seem to become really famous during the chase of Bin Laden. Several people also argue that the use of drones can shape wars to worse by reducing people’s empathy due to the lack of human-human contact (beats us to try to imagine an empathic war….). The use of drones also faces some legislation issues in several parts of the world. A few countries have clear legislation regarding the use of drones, its maximum flight height, size and permitted areas; in most case drones are not allowed to fly near airports and populated areas.

The association of GPS, smaller and more accurate cameras, thermal infrared cameras, and other sensory devices to drones expanded their uses. Drones have been used in cinema, advertisement, agriculture, and sports. Their widespread use is associated to their cost-benefit, as drones are relatively cheap, depending on what you need, you can purchase one for less than U$ 2,000.

Fig. 2 Dugong identification in Australia. Source: Hodgson et al. 2013.

Apart from these more popular uses we are all familiar with, drones are also helping solve problems in the biological sciences, and the integration among marine conservation biologists, computer scientists, and engineers are providing a handful of new applications for drones. For example, aquatic organisms use to be difficult to study and require methods such as underwater visual censuses, direct sampling, and aerial surveys, which tend to be all expensive and logistically difficult. Surveys of marine megafauna, in many cases, are already done with planes or helicopters, which are not only really expensive, but also noisy, which can disturb the animals being studied and interfere with the results. This is where drones, as predicted, come in handy: they come at a fraction of the cost of a plane, sound bug-like, and fly at lower altitudes, therefore providing more accurate images.

In the complex Amazonian environment drones are being used to map the distribution of the Amazon River Dolphin over a large area. This work is just beginning, but it has already provided an impressive amount of information at a low cost. Along the Australian coast, drones have counted hundreds of Dugongs during only seven flights covering 1.3km² each (Fig 2). Green Turtles have been successfully located and identified, and, even more impressive, their mating behavior has been also described using drone images (Fig 3). And the list goes on: drones have been used to map seabed coverage and nursery areas for juvenile fish, to detect body condition in humpback whales during breeding events, to survey cetacean in Timor Leste and to study sharks and rays densities in reef systems. Those who study small organisms can also benefit from the use of drones: for example, they have provided centimeter-scale images of reefs.

The potential of drones seems endless. They have been used to empower human communities and aid conservation: with proper training, people can use small drones to monitor forest use by local communities under a community-based management system. They can also be easily applied to monitor fisheries. In Belize, for instance, the government has compromised to use drones to fight illegal fishing.

Fig. 3. Location of green turtles. Source: Bevan et al. 2015

Two main flight methods are usually used in biological surveys and conservation monitoring. The first one requires the pre-programming of a grid to be covered during a flight, which is usually done with fixed-wing drones. This is a more systematic approach and can be used to get abundance and distribution data of a given species. The second approach requires a ground pilot to maneuver the drone and choose specific locations, individual or small groups of animals or areas to monitor. In this free-flight method rotary-wing drones are used, because these are more flexible and can fly at even lower heights.

Just as some other new technologies developed along the last years, the challenge now is how to analyze an enormous volume of data that drones provided. Nevertheless, a new path has been set to give drones are much more positive use than what made them initially famous for. 

 By Júlia Tovar Verba

References

Anderson, K., & Gaston, K. J. (2013). Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles will revolutionize spatial ecology. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 11(3), 138-146.

Bevan, E., Wibbels, T., Navarro, E., Rosas, M., Najera, B., Sarti, L., ... & Burchfield, P. (2015). Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) Technology for Locating, Identifying, and Monitoring Courtship and Mating Behavior in the Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas). Herpetological Review, 47(1), 27-32.

Chabot, D., & Bird, D. M. (2015). Wildlife research and management methods in the 21st century: Where do unmanned aircraft fit in? 1. Journal of Unmanned Vehicle Systems, 3(4), 137-155.

Chirayath, V., & Earle, S. A. (2016). Drones that see through waves–preliminary results from airborne fluid lensing for centimetre‐scale aquatic conservation. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, 26(S2), 237-250.

Hodgson, A., Kelly, N., & Peel, D. (2013). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for surveying marine fauna: a dugong case study. PloS one, 8(11), e79556.

Kiszka, J. J., Mourier, J., Gastrich, K., & Heithaus, M. R. (2016). Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to investigate shark and ray densities in a shallow coral lagoon. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 560, 237-242.

Paneque-Gálvez, J., McCall, M. K., Napoletano, B. M., Wich, S. A., & Koh, L. P. (2014). Small drones for community-based forest monitoring: An assessment of their feasibility and potential in tropical areas. Forests, 5(6), 1481-1507.

A fragile sex in fisheries?

In coastal settlements in Brazil, we often see women at the edge of the mangrove swamp, harvesting clams and seaweed, or back in their villages weaving nets and benefiting fish, with children in tow. The activities performed by these women are unstable and discontinuous, which depend unconditionally on environmental conditions, and also on social factors, such as being pregnant or with very young children at home.
Women’s work is socially, economically, and ecologically relevant, but still invisible. We don´t know exactly what, how much, when and why they harvest. We don´t know how much of their product ends up in the market and if their market poses the same limitations faced by fishermen. We don´t know if their work is even more important to food security than male’s work and if it also contributes to the household economy when other activities fail. We, as a country, fail to recognize the overall role of artisanal fisheries in Brazil, but we manage to do a much poorer job when it comes to recognizing the role played by fisherwomen.
Apart from the characteristic informality of the sector, one of the difficulties in making these women visible is the fact that we don’t have a general definition of the meaning of "fishing". Common sense and also current legislation define fishing as the harvest of fish from the sea or freshwater using some sort of fishing gear (net, line and hook, trap, harpoon, etc.). Under such definition, women participation in fisheries is basically irrelevant.
Clam and crab harvesting, locally known as mariscagem, is one of the most emblematic example of invisibility in fisheries in Brazil. This activity is performed in mangroves and tidal flats and is particularly dominated by women, especially clam harvesting. There is no database that accounts for how many shellfish women collectors are scattered along the Brazilian coast, but there are certainly over tens of thousands. In most instances they are not even locally and socially recognized as fishers, which contribute to the lack of statistics on their total number.

Dona Vera fishing in Bahia. Photo by Laura Honda

However, according to the World Bank, women play an extremely important role within the fishing industry; their data suggest that 47% of the people engaged in fishing are actually women. Recently, a study published in the journal Coastal Management sought to quantify and characterize the contribution of women in fishing, based on five countries: Mexico, Peru, Senegal, South Africa and Vietnam. The authors had to dig into whatever source they could find, but their findings did corroborate the utmost importance of women for the fishing industry. In these five countries, 1% to 13% of the people directly engaged in the fishing activity are female. While on the one hand these figures seem to indicate a modest contribution of women to the sector, their representativeness in activities indirectly related to the fishing sector such as processing and commercialization can reach up to 90%, as observed in Senegal. In Peru, for example, women represent 77% of the total number of people engaged in activities indirectly associated with fishing. If expanded for the other countries, we would very likely find the same exact picture. For instance, in the Brazilian northeast, women are estimated to represent about 35% of the workforce in activities related to the fish and seafood trade.
Another problem that women face to be recognized is the fact that their work often ends up being confused with domestic work. In the case of small-scale fisheries, women's work usually involves processing and marketing the catches, whose production chain is almost 100% informal. Most of the work is done from home, while women perform regular house chores.
For being invisible, these women do not enter fishing records and statistics, do not participate in decision-making processes and many fail to receive social benefits associated to fishing and social recognition. Bringing fisherwomen to the forefront necessarily involves a more precise quantification and characterization of their role in the fishing value chain and the strengthening of their organizational mechanisms. Women, especially in the northeast of Brazil, have been trying to improve their participation, not only by claiming rights for themselves but also for their communities. These women have been fighting to achieve representation for all fishers, regardless of their gender, and also for their communities in political instances where decisions are made; they have been trying to promote the insertion of the fishing economy in new socio-environmental contexts; and to unveil themes related to democracy, rights and environmental dynamics. The future belongs to them, but it is our role as scientists and organized civil society to make their path more amenable. 

By Ana Helena Bevilacqua

References

[1] Bevilacqua, A.H.V. et al. 2017. Following the fish: the income distribution in a Small-Scale fishery. In press.

[2] Guy, A. 2016. Vital but invisible: how subsistence fisherwomen around the world feed their families. Topic: Save the Oceans Feed the World. Oceana International Blog, oceana.org, April 7.

[3] Harper, S.; Grubb, C.; Stiles, M.; Sumaila, U.R. 2017. Contributions by women to fisheries economies: Insights from five maritime countries. Coastal Management, 45(2): 1-16.

[4] Maneschy, M.C.; Siqueira, D.; Álvares, M.L.M. 2012. Pescadoras: subordinação de gênero e empoderamento. Rev. Estud. Fem. vol.20 no.3 Florianópolis Sept./Dec. 2012.