Since their discovery by Mandelbrot (The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Freeman, New York, 1977), fractals have experienced considerable success in quantifying the complex structure exhibited by many natural patterns and have captured the imaginations of scientists and artists alike. With ever-widening appeal, they have been referred to both as ‘‘fingerprints of nature’’ (Nature 399 (1999) 422) an...

Human impacts on the planet are profound (Crutzen 2002), driving losses of biodiversity (Pimm et al. 2014), and ecosystem services (Costanza et al. 2014). Human population growth and climate change exacerbate these strains. Concern that conservation is not keeping pace has fueled debate regarding the effectiveness of traditional conservation strategies and how conservation org– anizations shoul...

about the substantial risks associated with efforts to conserve nature by fulfilling human needs and appealing to corporate responsibility. Further shifting the limited capacity of conservation towards efforts that prioritize embracing development and advancing human prosperity will come at the expense of other approaches and still leave much of nature imperiled. We remain unclear on whether th...

This paper is concerned with nature conservation by automatically monitoring animal distribution and animal abundance. Typically, such conservation tasks are performed manually on foot or after an aerial recording from a manned aircraft. Such manual approaches are expensive, slow and labor intensive. In this paper, we investigate the combination of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drone...