The NSW Government has invested $2.3 million through the Digital Restart Fund to establish the NSW Wildlife Drone Hub – a commitment to give New South Wales a drone capability for biodiversity monitoring.
What we do
The NSW Wildlife Drone Hub enables land managers in New South Wales to survey biodiversity using drones. Our goal is to make biodiversity surveys more efficient and encourage the consistent uptake of drones for the management of biodiversity.
The Drone Hub provides specialised training that enables the use of drones to detect both wildlife and vegetation.
The Drone Hub manages the data collected by drones and provides digital tools and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) analytics. This data will be accessible through a digital dashboard that allows managers to analyse and interact with the data in real time.
Through research and operations, the Drone Hub has completed the following:
Why we use drones
Drones fitted with thermal cameras can survey complex, dangerous or sensitive terrain to detect wildlife. Some advantages of drones over traditional on-ground operations include less disturbance, improved detection and survey efficiencies.
A single drone can survey between 100 to 200 hectares a night, as they travel at 30km/h. Drones, however, are often deployed at the same time as ground surveys as complementary approaches.
