Associate Professor University of Oxford Oxford, England, United Kingdom
Demography is a data-hungry science. The ecological models we parameterise to predict invasions and extinctions typically require observations of a minimum of 100 individuals or so for our forecasts to how low uncertainties. In parallel to the development of statistical approaches to borrow strength across heterogeneous datasets, technologies in UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and autonomous robots have rapidly develop in the past decade. Here, I present a pipeline developed in my lab in collaboration with the Oxford Robotics Institute that allows for fast and accurate tracking of individual fates of plants in an experiment evaluating impacts of droughts and disturbances.
