Use of Drones in Protected Areas, Indigenous Lands, and National Parks

Dear Colleagues, 

Drones provide flexible, cost-effective, and high-resolution observational capacity in remote and legally restricted landscapes, which are referred to in this Special Issue as protected areas, Indigenous lands, and national parks. Emerging technologies are being used to complement satellite and crewed aerial platforms, and by delivering on-demand, fine-scale data, enable novel workflows in adaptive land management, ecological monitoring, anti-poaching, land-use planning, and livelihood programs. This leads to the creation of new areas in ecological and environmental research that facilitate new governance mechanisms and community co-design and management, which aligns with First Nations land rights, and National and International conservation obligations and goals. The aim of this Special Issue is to collect papers (original research articles and review papers) that advance science, practice, and policy at the nexus of UAV technologies’ conservation management practices, Indigenous partnerships, and protected-area governance. We particularly welcome contributions that move from one-off deployments to systematic, repeatable monitoring missions that inform long-term, adaptive management and decision-making procedures. In line with this general theme, this Special Issue will welcome a variety of topics including the following:

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

• UAV-enabled wildlife surveys that outperform conventional methods;
• Protocols for repeatable, long-term monitoring in protected areas;
• Co-designed UAV programs with Indigenous communities;
• Fire regime assessment, emissions accounting, and biodiversity outcomes;
• Post-disturbance mapping for restoration targeting and resilience planning;
• Hydrological monitoring, river fragmentation, and connectivity;
• Sensor fusion pipelines and AI models tailored to conservation tasks;
• Ethics of UAV use in culturally sensitive landscapes;
• Decision-support tools integrating UAV data into park management and policy;
• Novel methodologies, validated workflows, or benchmarking studies;
• Demonstrated conservation or governance outcomes linked to UAV data;
• Case studies with transferable lessons for protected-area managers;
• Frameworks for ethical engagement and consent with Indigenous partners;
• Open tools, datasets, or reproducible pipelines that advance the field.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Prof. Dr. Hamish A. Campbell
Dr. Rebecca Rogers
Prof. Dr. Naomi Millner
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• protected areas
• Indigenous co-design
• wildlife monitoring
• habitat mapping
• fire management
• disaster response
• wetland monitoring
• adaptive management