Monitoring seabirds on Cocos Keeling Islands

This project seeks to trial drones to count tree nesting seabirds in colonies. Previous work by our group has focused on seabirds nesting on bare earth and this grant would extend our work to the next challenge which is identifying and accurately counting nests that are placed in trees. North Keeling Island supports one of the largest Red-footed Booby colonies in the world. As tree nesting species this presents as an ideal study system in which to test the efficacy of the method