UAVs for Nature Conservation Tasks in Complex Environments

Dear Colleagues,

Recent technological advancements in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have rapidly expanded their use in complex applications such as nature conservation, including monitoring, reconnaissance, mapping, tracking, and sample collection tasks, among others. UAVs and their miniaturized versions, generally called micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), have provided a previously unimaginable, yet valuable and reliable means of data collection, from images and point clouds to acoustic or eDNA samples.

This Special Issue is a collaboration between the IMAV 2024 Conference and the EU WildDrone Project, with the aim to collect new UAV developments, methodologies, best practices, and applications in complex outdoor environments (e.g., savanna) and complex nature conservation tasks (e.g., monitoring or sampling).

The Special Issue welcomes submissions related but not limited to the following:

• UAV/MAV sensing and perception in complex environments;
• Collaborative systems and swarm intelligence;
• Design of novel vehicle types (hybrids, propulsion, silent);
• Autonomous navigation in GNSS-denied environments;
• Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations;
• Temporal planning and rerouting;
• On-board/real-time processing, including AI methods;
• Evaluation of UAV/MAV technologies in applications related to nature conservation.

Prof. Dr. Tom Richardson
Prof. Dr. Ulrik Pagh Schultz Lundquist
Prof. Dr. Fabio Remondino
Guest Editors

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