THERMAL DRONE DEER RESEARCH

White-tailed deer surveys are conducted to learn more about a given population of deer, such as deer abundance, adult sex ratio, fawn recruitment, buck age structure, and/or quality of bucks

Many local and state-level deer management decisions are driven by results from these surveys, and, consequently, it is important that surveys are as accurate as possible. Researchers have used many different tools to conduct aerial and ground-based deer surveys, including spotlights, thermal imagers, and game cameras; however, managers are continually seeking more efficient and cost-effective survey equipment.

Deer surveys are often extremely time consuming and expensive to conduct, and the development of more efficient methods that maintain a high level of accuracy are a win all around.

Recently, there has been rapidly growing interest in evaluating the utility of small unmanned aircraft, or drones, to conduct aerial surveys. Today’s drones are relatively affordable and user-friendly, and it just makes sense that we would