Assessing the viability of small aerial drones to quantify recreational fishers

Abstract

Understanding fishing participation assists sustainable fisheries management. Relative to commercial fisheries, however, accurate quantitative data on recreational fishing is often more challenging to collect. The quality and robustness of recreational fishing surveys to assess fisher numbers may be improved with cost‐effective remote sensing platforms, such as aerial drones. Here, the precision and cost‐effectiveness of drone‐based surveys were compared with more traditional vessel‐based surveys of recreational fishing participation at four locations on the east coast of Australia. Although vessel‐based surveys had greater initial costs, this technique observed more fishers, took less time to complete and did not require post‐processing of video footage. In comparison, the drone‐based video surveys provided greater precision and a permanent record of fishing activity. Currently, drone‐based techniques do not provide a substantial improvement to traditional vessel‐based counts of fishers. The complimentary use of drones appears to be an appropriate application of this technology for supporting fisheries management.

Spatial Structure, Short-temporal Variability, and Dynamical Features of Small River Plumes as Observed by Aerial Drones: Case Study of the Kodor and Bzyp River Plumes

“…Airborne remote sensing of sea surface is constantly expanding during the last ten years due to significant progress in development of aerial drones, especially low-cost quadcopters [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Many previous works used airborne data to study various marine processes including mapping of coastal topography [7,8] and bathymetry [9][10][11][12], surveying of marine flora and fauna [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], and monitoring of water quality and anthropogenic pollution [23][24][25][26][27][28]. Several works used airborne data to study physical properties of sea surface layer including estimation of turbulence [29] and reconstruction of surface currents [30,31].…”

Evaluating the effectiveness of drones for quantifying invasive upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea sp.) in Lake Macquarie, Australia

“…If either assumption was violated, a natural log transformation was used, after which assumptions were satisfied. The relative precision (P) of counts from drone footage compared to direct visual observations from a kayak was estimated using Standard Error (SE)/mean [ 34 , 43 ] of transects for each method at each site.…”

Coastal radar as a tool for continuous and fine-scale monitoring of vessel activities of interest in the vicinity of marine protected areas

“…Satellite-based solutions, including synthetic aperture radar (SAR), radio frequency (RF) detection, and optical imagery, used by Global Fishing Watch, HawkEye360, and others [37,38], offer non-participatory methods but can be limited by temporal resolution, data processing requirements, and difficulty in detecting small vessels amongst waves and coastline features [39]. For small-scale activity in coastal areas, autonomous marine vehicles and drones have been used to monitor areas of interest [40,41]. The need for technologies that can enhance management of smallscale fisheries worldwide is addressed by numerous international goals [42].…”