Decentralized Vision-Based Autonomous Aerial Wildlife Monitoring

Reliable wildlife monitoring is essential for ecology and conservation, yet many existing methods, such as tagging, capture, and close-range observation, can alter the very behaviors they aim to measure. Aerial robots offer a scalable alternative, which has shown promising performance in multiple studies. Nonetheless, existing approaches typically lack behavioral awareness, rely on fixed heuristics, or require real-world training data that are costly, impractical, and ethically difficult to obtain. As a result, there remains no general framework for adaptive drone-based monitoring that can both preserve ecological validity and scale across species, behaviors, and robotic platforms. In this study, we introduce a disturbance-aware reinforcement-learning-based framework for heterogeneous aerial robotic fleets that enables autonomous wildlife tracking while explicitly minimizing behavioral disruption. We couple a zoologically grounded simulation environment with fitted animal movement models derived from real trajectory statistics, and train control policies using a reward formulation that captures the trade-off between observation quality and disturbance risk. Across three species (pigeon, jackal, and spur-winged lapwing) with distinct ecologies and motion patterns and four increasingly strategic behavior models common in nature, the learned policies consistently surpassed currently used rule-based baselines and generalized across monitoring tasks, animal dynamics, and drone types. These results establish disturbance-aware learning as a viable foundation for non-invasive autonomous wildlife observation, opening a path towards scalable, ethically responsible, and scientifically reliable robotic monitoring in ecology and conservation.

Reliable individual re-identification (re-ID) of wildlife is essential for population monitoring, behavioral tracking, and conservation policy evaluation, yet large-scale data collection remains labor-intensive, relying on manual efforts by ecologists or citizen scientists. We propose an autonomous drone navigation system that actively optimizes image capture for downstream re-ID, moving beyond passive aerial sensing. The system combines YOLOv11 object detection with a DINOv2-based pose classifier to guide real-time flight decisions: detecting animals, orienting to expose the lateral flank (the surface of interest for pattern-based re-ID), and approaching until the subject meets a minimum bounding-box threshold. Unlike prior drone systems that optimize for group-level behavioral video, ours targets the specific image-quality requirements of individual-identification models. We demonstrate feasibility through a case study on zebra using footage collected in Kenya, and show the approach generalizes to other species with diagnostic surface patterns, including giraffes, tigers, and elephants. Our work establishes a framework for task-aware embodied AI for ecological data collection, in which downstream re-ID requirements drive real-time perception and control.

Monocular RGB cameras mounted on drones are widely used for wildlife monitoring, yet most analytical pipelines remain confined to two-dimensional image space, leaving geometric information in video underexploited. We present WildLIFT, a computational framework that integrates three-dimensional scene geometry from monocular drone video with open-vocabulary 2D instance segmentation to enable species-agnostic 3D detection and tracking. Oriented 3D bounding box labels with semantic face information enable quantitative assessment of viewpoint coverage and inter-animal occlusion, producing structured metadata for downstream ecological analyses. We validate the framework on 2,581 manually curated frames comprising over 6,700 3D detections across four large mammal species. WildLIFT maintains high identity consistency in multi-animal scenes and substantially reduces manual 3D annotation effort through keyframe-based refinement. By transforming standard drone footage into structured 3D and viewpoint-aware representations, WildLIFT extends the analytical utility of aerial wildlife datasets for behavioural research and population monitoring.