Crash Theory: Entrapments of Conservation Drones and Endangered Megafauna

Abstract

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena.

Drone Power: Conservation, Humanitarianism, Policing and War

“…Days and often nights are spent with impacted communities, waiting for calm weather, preparing, flying, analyzing and dismantling (insert Image 1). Far from an isolated example, this description of drone humanitarianism is common as confirmed by interviews with drone humanitarians in Asia, Europe and the Americas (Fish, 2021). Contrary to Sandvik and Lohne's argument (2014), seeing-from-afar does not separate the drone pilot from dull, dirty and dangerous work.…”

“…Drones and their study emerged in this epoch of irrevocable entrapment – entrenched neoliberalism, cascading climatic synergies, trophic oceanic and terrestrial decay, and robotic and autonomous warfare. Ours is a world trapped by the entropy of the crash: failing ecosystems, boom and bust economies, collapsing infrastructures and overreaching and glitchy technologies (Fish, 2021). Drones are existential technologies that variously attempt, succeed and fail to contain or control zoê at key throughput nodes within convoluted global assemblages (Collier and Ong, 2007).…”

A UAS and Machine Learning Classification Approach to Suitability Prediction of Expanding Natural Habitats for Endangered Flora Species

“…Since the evaluated environmental conditions, including vegetation, soil, and topography criteria, impact the ecological gradient of both flora and fauna species [50][51][52], the proposed approach should be applicable to a wide variety of endangered species. Moreover, the application of the UAS mounted multispectral camera system ensured that flora and fauna species would be minimally disturbed in their natural habitat during the field observations and non-invasive population count [53]. However, the proposed suitability calculation approach presently does not include environmental conditions which are difficult to model in the GIS environment but are impactful on habitat suitability of flora species.…”

Saildrones and Snotbots in the Blue Anthropocene: Sensing technologies, multispecies intimacies, and scientific storying

“…As an extension of human mobility and vision, drone piloting is an embodied experience, requires focused attention, and creates elevated states that generate considerable immersion into the subjects it investigates. I have flown drones for over 100 hours and have published accounts of precarious flights, technological foibles, and the heightened views the drone provides ( Fish, 2022b, 2021; Fish et al., 2018). Narrations from pilots from Europe to the Americas and Australasia confirm that far from being a disembodied act, drone piloting is emotionally charged (Garrett and Anderson, 2018; Hildebrand, 2021; Jablonowski, 2020; Klauser and Pedrozo, 2017; Serafinelli and O’Hagan, 2022).…”

“…Drones can also count wildlife more accurately, with greater precision, and with less bias than human surveyors (Hodgson et al, 2018(Hodgson et al, : 1161. They have their limitations: they disturb marine animals, crash, and often make people uncomfortable with their potential for privacy infraction (Christiansen et al, 2016;Fish, 2021). Despite these issues, drones are revolutionizing data retrieval in oceanography.…”