NOAA - Scientists use UAS to survey wildlife in Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

July 08, 2014

“This is a great example of how investing in our ability to deploy state of the art technology to conduct observations in remote locations can provide critical data to help NOAA in our conservation and resilience missions,” said Todd Jacobs, project scientist for NOAA Research’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program, and lead for the Hawai‘i missions. “This operation validated our hopes that we can use the aircraft in the Monument for a variety of missions without harming the environment to get data that we wouldn’t otherwise get. We were able to survey in remote coves for monk seals and turtles in conditions that we may not have been able to safely land people ashore.”

“The monk seal mission was wildly successful,” said Charles Littnan, NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center Lead Scientist for the Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program. “We were able to identify animals on the beach and in the water, identify mother-pup pairs, and get a sense of the age class of the animal – all things that are important for population monitoring. The data collected by the Puma will nicely supplement our current hands-on approach to the recovery of the species.”