Data for: Drone surveys of birds foraging in intertidal habitats: A proof-of-concept in Moreton Bay, Australia

Full description

We used a DJI Mavic 3 Enterprize to survey a 650m x 250m section of intertidal mudflat surrounding Minjerribah (-27.51, 153.41), an island in Moreton Bay off the east coast of Australia. We flew the drone at 80m height, capturing images at a ground sampling distance of 0.00429mmpix-1, covering 16m x 12m of ground per image. Images were captured in 7 straight lines spaced 75m apart, oriented perpendicular to the shoreline, flight speed was 4ms-1. The drone pilot had their remote pilots licence and flights were approved by the Department of Environment and Science, Ausralin Government, the Queensland Animal Ethics Committee (2021/AE000474), and the Quandamooka Yulluburrabee Aboriginal Corporation. During surveys, I also observed the birds with a spotting scope from the drone launch point 250m away from the site and recorded the number and species of birds within the study site as well as any signs of disturbance. I have four years of experience surveying birds across intertidal mudflats. To make viewing the transects easier, I mosaiced the images from the transects together to create 7 long mosaics, one for each transect. To orthorectify and mosaic the images I used Web Open Drone Map. Within the WebODM application, I uploaded the images from a transect, then created the orthomosaic using the settings: crop: 0, fast-orthophoto: true, ignore-gsd: true, orthophoto-resolution: 0.429, sfm-algorithm: planar. Because orthorectifying the images can introduce distortions that can reduce the quality of the images, I also mosaicked the images without orthorectifying them. To do this, I used Python to manually paste the images into one large image, using the drone positional data stored in the image Exif to position each image correctly. The birds within the images were detected and identified both manually, and using the computer vision tool developed by Wilson et al. (2025). The results of this survey are given in the supporting material provided here. Code CS1_Transect_Spacing.R: Code used to determine error associated with transect drone wildlife surveys based on transect spacing and wildlife abundance, density and clustering. CS2_Mosaic_Images.py: Code to stitch raw drone survey images into a single image for each transect. CS3_Modify_Mission.py: Code to modify the survey kmz file generated by DJI Pilot 2 Application to change the survey height and camera zoom. Data TS1_Species: List of the native bird species found in the Moreton Bay local government area. TS2_Computer_Orthomosaic: Computer vision tool counts of the birds in the orthomosaic images. TS3_Computer_Mosaic: Computer vision tool counts of the birds in the mosaic images. TS4_Manual: Manual counts of the birds in the orthomosaic images. TS5_Ground: Ground counts of the birds conducted at the same time as the drone survey. TS6_Computer_Assessment: Assessment of the computer vision tool performance compared to the manual counts of drone images. TS7_Results: Summary of the results of the survey.