Have you ever ever seen a dugong in actual life? These large, friendly-looking vegetarians (affectionately referred to as “sea cows”) may be present in coastal waters world wide from East Africa to Australia. Sadly, their coastal habitat can be favored by us for improvement and fishing actions — resulting in dwindling populations over time.
As a marine mammal scientist, my major analysis is round monitoring marine megafauna and their essential habits. Most of that analysis has targeted on dugongs. Dugongs are a very good indicator of ecosystem well being, that means if a seagrass meadow has a thriving dugong inhabitants, it’s doubtless doing fairly nicely. And if there aren’t so many dugongs, then we have to look into how we will help the seagrass ecosystem (and the opposite animals relying on it) get more healthy.
What makes dugong monitoring fairly tough is that one of the best ways of counting them is from the air. This implies I’ve spent many lots of of hours staring out of the window of a small aircraft recognizing and counting animals. In 2007, after I was one of many first on this planet to research the potential for utilizing drones for fauna surveys. And though the drones have been safer and supplied higher knowledge, we have been left with 1000’s of nonetheless photos from every survey to manually look by way of.
