BUTUAN CITY -- Unmanned aerial vehicles (UEVs) or drones can become an essential tool in environmental protection and conservation as pointed out during the 2nd Mindanao Protected Area Management Board (PAMB) network conference here last Wednesday, August 30.
Drones are especially useful in drawing up a successful protected area management plan, according to Franz-Fabian Bellot, technical advisor for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), a German cooperation development agency working in Mindanao.
“You can monitor your protected area, go and record the same area over and over again when you like it and when you want it, you don’t need to put a piloted aircraft or go to space with a satellite to record the data, you decide whenever you want to record the information you need,” Bellot said.
Bellot said the use of drones can be both efficient and cost effective as it reduces the need for additional human resources.
“One person is sufficient to do the flight plan, conduct the flight, analyze the data, process the data, you don’t need a lot of remote sensing and other specialists,” he said.
“It is such a simple technology and it does not require a lot of skills to use, anyone can learn how to use it in just a couple of days so you can cut back in your human and resource cost in implementing the project or monitoring the protected area,” Bellot said.
Felix Mirasol Jr, regional director of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)-Zamboanga Peninsula (Western Mindanao), said drones can also come in handy in reaching hard-to-reach areas.
“If we have this technology, maybe in one-months time, maybe we would have covered the entire protected area. So we have now the capability of monitoring the area without basically walking through the entire site,” Mirasol said.
Mirasol said they are currently making use of technology using tablets through the LAWIN Forest and Biodiversity Protection System.
“In terms of technology, we have implemented our Lawin, we give tablets to our forest rangers and we can tract their location and the patrol routes of our forest rangers. This helps us monitor our personnel if they are really doing patrol works, the moment they will see issues on the ground they will take photos and then immediately it will be uploaded to our offices. The technology will directly record observations on habitat, wildlife, trees, threats and illegal activities. The use of drones will greatly improve our monitoring and documenting capability,” said Mirasol.
Since 2013, several regional offices of the DENR in Mindanao have expressed interest in the use of drones to monitor illegal logging activities. However, the utilization of the full potential of the technology has not yet been fully optimized, according to an environmental group based in the Caraga Region.