Abstract

Habitat monitoring of national parks in The Bahamas can be challenging, as they can be large, remote, and difficult to navigate. With threats to natural environments and endemic species like development and climate change, and with The Bahamas being a fisheries-reliant county, habitat monitoring is more important now than ever. However, conservation can be quite limited in resources, in terms of personnel, capacity, and funding. To help with management of its parks, the Bahamas National Trust (BNT) has adopted a small fleet of drones and used them to collect aerial imagery of a few national parks within the system (Bahamas National Trust, 2023). An alternative to satellite or LiDAR imagery, drones provide high-quality images that can be used for surveillance and monitoring by remote sensing. The imagery is often of a much higher resolution than freely available aerial or satellite imagery like Google Earth or Landsat and can be collected rapidly and with minimal human input. Additionally, purchasing a low-cost drone is much cheaper than having to pay for high-resolution remote sensing imagery (Pin Koh & Wich, 2012; Lowe, Adnan, Hamylton, Carvalho, & Woodroffe, 2019; Schaefer, et al., 2020). The aim of this project was to explore if using low-cost drones was an effective way to collect aerial imagery for monitoring, remote sensing, and national park management in Bahamian national parks.

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