Mar 10, 2021 —
Fish biologist, Matthew Windle operates a research drone. Photo: Victoria Windle
Fish biologist Matt Windle first started using drones back in 2013, to track critically endangered American eels.
"It's my favorite fish. It's the most amazing fish, freshwater fish in North America," he says, "I hate to use the comparison, but they look kind of like a long snake, but they're not snakes, they're fish."
Windle works for the River Institute, a conservation organization in Cornwall, ON – just across the St. Lawrence River from Massena, NY. Almost a decade ago, he and his colleagues had fitted eels with radio trackers and released them back into the St. Lawrence to try and identify where in the river they spent their time.
At the beginning of the project, they would follow them in an old school way, criss-crossing the river in a boat trying to pick up their signal.
"Yeah, it was very time consuming," he says.
Once, they rented a small plane to fly the length of the river with a radio receiver. That was expensive.
But other biologists were just starting to use drones for research, mostly taking aerial photos to count populations of seals or salmon. Windle’s team had the idea of putting their receiver on a drone and flying that over the river, which turned out to work really well, "just really speeding things up for us in terms of we can do more in the field now."
You can see drone footage of the St. Lawrence in this video from the River Institute on its fish sampling work.
To the casual observer, the St. Lawrence River is one huge, wide body of water, but it’s actually a complex system of interconnected habitats, from deep water to shallow marshes, with pressures including dams and contaminants affecting its health along the way.
Drones, it turns out, give scientists a bunch of new ways to map the river from above. Windle notes the technology has improved in the last decade, with drones getting bigger, more able to carry more and different types of cameras and integrate with new software.
"Multispectral cameras can also collect information on wavelengths of light that we can't see," he says, "which tells you about plant health. So, healthy green plants have lots of chlorophyll in them. And they absorb most of the visible light, and they reflect really strongly near-infrared light."
Thermal cameras can show where runoff flows into the river, because it will often show up as a different temperature.
Sometimes, Windle says his research team has made fun discoveries, surveying the river from above.
"We ended up finding shipwreck underwater," known to local diving groups, he acknowledges, but "we had never seen it before.
"We would have totally missed it if we hadn't had the drone perspective up in the air," he says, "so, that was amazing. It was probably about 100 year old shipwrecked wooden boat, 40 feet long, on the bottom of the river."
Windle’s colleague at the River Institute, Leigh McGaughey says there are a number of areas where further information-gathering can help to answer pressing questions about the Upper St. Lawrence ecosystem.
"We've had so much industry over the last 100 years, and the area has been identified by both Canada and the US as an area of concern because of contaminants that are in the river," she explains.
This included Alcoa and General Motors on the US side and Domtar on the Canadian side, though most industrial operations on the river’s edge have actually shuttered over the past 20 years.
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Researchers in Ontario are using drone technology that gives them new ways to study the river - from the air. Photo courtesy of the River Institute.
"People want to know now, how is the ecosystem recovering? You know, are we seeing recovery of the species, and are we able to eat more of the fish?" Questions she says the types of monitoring scientists are doing can help to answer. She is working to assemble existing data from different research teams into a report for the general public.
Both she and Windle say new technology like drones and sensors can collect so much data so quickly, one of the big challenges is finding the time to process all the data and extract meaningful lessons from it.
"It can be a little overwhelming, actually," says Windle, "when you start to think about all the uses you can have with drones."
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