In April, the Cambridge Conservation Tech Group held its second meetup, which brought together colleagues from RSPB, Birdlife, FFI, BAS, Makespace and BTO. We spent the first half hour meeting informally and talking in small pockets, followed by a presentation and full group discussion around the topic of using drones for monitoring forests. 

Tom Swinfield (right) of RSPB gave us a great run through his work on this topic, which served as a starting point for discussion. To find out more about Tom's work, check out his case study in the resources are of WILDLABS.NET.

The group discussion touched on many points, including:

• Limitations of drones, the main one being training and access to the software needed to stitch the images taken by the drone together. Although their are a couple of different commercial software options, they can be very expensive ($3000+). It was suggested that a solution might be to build an open source version of this software.
• Helicopters vs planes - planes offer longer flight times so greater ground coverage but are more difficult to fly (and land successfully). Mission planner was mentioned as an open source flight planner.  
• Dronetruthing - could drones offer a way of ground truthing larger satellite imagery? 
• Species ID - there was a brainstorm about potential ways to identify tree species using the photography and models generated with drones. NDVI, hyper-spectral imagery were suggested - but the drone payload capacity was identified as a key limitation.

CCI Collaborative Fund

The group also discussed ideas for a CCI Collaborative Fund proposal. In addition to securing some funding to support this group, the group also discussed the idea of funding to improve data processing. If you have any ideas or want to contribute to this proposal, please get in touch with Gavin Shelton to discuss.
 

New Members

There has been growing interest in this group - we now have over 50 subscribers, just by word of mouth! To manage this, I have shifted the email list into a mailchimp system, which will allow new members to join and existing members to manage their subscriptions without my intervention.

If you have colleagues who are interested in joining us, there is a signup page here.

Next Meetup: 11am Thursday, 26th May

We're teaming up with Makespace for our next meetup, with three members coming along to share what they've been working on: 

• Arik Kershenbaum: Wolf tracking
• Mayke Santos: A multispectral camera
• Peter Walsh: Gorilla Radio

The meetup will be in the Seminar Room of the David Attenborough Building. At 11am we will meet and mingle over coffee + cake, and at 11:30 we will start the discussion. 

All are welcome!