Elephants' calm response to drones opens new doors for observation - Study

In Kenya's Samburu National Reserve, a drone is closing in on a herd of elephants.

Unfazed, the animals playfully bathe in the Ewaso Nyiro River.

The elephants here are afraid of bees, and previously, the hum of a drone would see them flee.

But as technology has improved and drones have become quieter, elephant conservationists have been able to utilise the devices to observe and track the animals.

Before, the use of drones in elephant conservation mostly relied on their power to disturb: elephants would always run from them, making drones a useful tool to drive elephants from croplands.

Now, new work published by Save the Elephants (STE) and the University of Oxford has shown that elephants can learn to ignore machines.

It's a finding that could transform how scientists and conservationists monitor wildlife.

"All we've done with this paper is shown that elephants don't necessarily run away from drones and get scared by them. If you fly a drone right, if you fly it high, if you fly it gently, they can be an observational platform from which to observe elephants that they respond to without undue reaction," explains Frank Pope, Save The Elephants CEO.

"What our paper showed is that even when elephants do respond and have a reaction to the drone initially, that reaction usually wears off very quickly. And even within the course of a single drone flight, their behaviour will be back to baseline. And therefore, future studies into looking at elephant behaviour from this platform we can judge as being natural behaviour," he adds.

For decades, elephant interactions have been observed from alongside them, in vehicles, or in some cases on platforms.

In more recent years, drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have become increasingly important for research.

But there was concern the drones would disturb the elephants.

"In 'elephant world,' we've been very interested in drones. What can we do with them, how can they help? And the first application that's been used is really trying to help farmers with elephants that are marauding into their croplands and it's pretty dangerous work pushing elephants out from that farmland. And because we know that elephants are scared of bees and they don't like the sound of bees, that makes drones a very good way to push elephants out of crops. So everyone got into this mindset that 'oh elephants must be scared of drones,' well it turns out that they don't have to be and that's why this new avenue of research has opened up," says Pope.

Now drones offer a completely new perspective on what is happening within a herd.

According to the study, this will allow researchers to observe for the first time how individuals in a group of elephants inter-relate in different situations.

The on-board cameras and integrated sensors gather large amounts of data - data vital for researchers.

"The extraordinary thing about these drones is that they're not just a camera with a camera in the sky, they come with all sorts of additional sensors that help you to locate the drone in time and place, so you get an idea of exactly where your drone is. It's also got a laser range finder, so you know exactly how high off the ground you are. And you've also got very accurate pan and tilt so you know where in the frame the elephants are. So what we're doing now is creating a tool with which we can analyse the footage that's taken from this drone with the elephants behaving naturally underneath. So this tool can now drop real world GPS positions on each of the individuals, elephants, in the frame for each of the frames in the video, and from that we can derive a lot of very rich behavioural data of what's happening in the herd," explains Pope.

Once the drone date is gathered, AI-enabled software can search for patterns that have until now eluded human researchers.

"I think the wider context of this is we need to improve the way that we get data about nature into digital form so that we can understand it better at scale. Nature is fantastically complicated. And one of the good news applications of artificial intelligence is going to be is that it's going to allow us to understand these multivariate landscapes and what is varying with what in a much better way. It's going to open up our minds to what's happening in these landscapes," says Pope.

The new study, published Thursday in Scientific Reports, saw researchers conduct 35 quadcopter drone trials on 14 individually known elephant families in northern Kenya’s Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves.