Carrying out aerial surveys using helicopters is associated with significant financial costs in the context of their annual increase. One of the solutions for optimizing aerial visual research will be the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Significant development of modern digital technologies (photo, video equipment, machine learning) allows for aerial surveys of spawning grounds, obtaining high-resolution images with subsequent object-oriented image analysis and obtaining quantitative estimates of biological objects of observation.
Today, specialists from the salmon fish laboratory conduct selective and continuous counts of producers that entered spawning reservoirs using UAVs on lakes Azabachye, Nachikinskoye and Kurilskoye, as well as the Paratunka and Avacha rivers. However, the technical characteristics of the aircraft used do not allow for long-term flight missions.
In November 2024, the fleet of the Kamchatka branch of VNIRO was replenished with two types of UAVs: fixed-wing (flight duration 180 minutes) and multi-rotor. These aircraft systems and the location of the existing, albeit very limited, road infrastructure on the peninsula will allow for aerial photography of vast territories and linear-extended objects with the creation of accurate and highly detailed orthophotomaps, census of Pacific salmon producers and monitoring the state of spawning areas, and the creation of electronic maps of spawning grounds.
In addition, new UAVs are planned to be used to assess the area of the common substrate during the spawning period of Pacific herring and to determine pre-spawning capelin aggregations in the coastal sea area.
Press service of VNIRO