drone

Monitoring waterfowl populations provides the basis for improving habitat quantity and quality, establishing harvest regulations, and ensuring sustainable waterfowl populations through appropriate management. Waterfowl biologists currently use a variety of population and habitat monitoring methods ranging from informal ground observations to low-level occupied aircraft surveys. Unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) may provide safer and more precise alternatives to traditional aerial survey techniques that are less disturbing to waterfowl, but there is limited information on how waterfowl in...

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC) conducted 56 h of unmanned aircraft operations between February 2017 and April 2018. Operations involved video and still photography for both scientific and public outreach purposes, mapping, and live surveillance. Some operations were conducted under the small unmanned aircraft rule (Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations §107) established by the Federal Aviation Administra- tion (FAA), while some were conducted under the terms of a Certificate of Authorization from the FAA. The initial training program consisted of a 32-h in-person class. After...

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC) budgeted approximately $US250,000 for air operations in fiscal year 2017, 74% of which was for aerial observation by manned aircraft. Small unmanned aircraft (sUAS) have lower operating costs than manned aircraft, and thus significant cost savings could be experienced were sUAS to replace manned aircraft. However, it is first necessary to evaluate that data from sUAS are comparable to data from manned aircraft. Therefore, angler pressure counts were conducted simultaneously using both manned aircraft and sUAS within the four management zones of...