UAVs for Nature Conservation Tasks in Complex Environments
A special issue of Drones (ISSN 2504-446X). This special issue belongs to the section "Drones in Ecology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 March 2025 | Viewed by 166
Special Issue Editors
Interests: flight mechanics and control; unmanned air vehicles
Interests: robot programming; programming languages and formal models; modular robotics; compilers and interpreters; software technology
Interests: geomatics; mapping; UAV
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
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
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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-blind 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.
Keywords
- UAV/MAV
- perception
- collaborative
- wildlife
- complex environments
- navigation
- mapping
- real-time
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