Drone with sticky patches studies biodiversity by bumping into trees

A drone has revealed info on the animals inhabiting a tree’s cover just by brushing in opposition to branches and accumulating free particles of environmental DNA with its sticky surfaces

By Matthew Sparkes

A drone partially wrapped in sticky tape can collect DNA from the branches of tall bushes and reveal which animals reside in that habitat.

Collecting environmental DNA (eDNA) – which comes from the shed cells, waste and blood of organisms – has revolutionised wildlife surveys. Rather than needing to bodily see and seize animals to take samples, we will merely analyse the DNA they go away of their environment.

People have typically harvested such DNA from water and air and catalogued the animals dwelling there, however tree canopies are more durable to achieve. Now, Stefano Mintchev on the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and his colleagues have developed a quadcopter drone that may collect samples from branches tens of metres above the bottom.

In experiments in Switzerland, the drone collected 14 samples from seven completely different tree species and recognized eDNA from 21 animal species, together with bugs, mammals and birds.

The backside of the 1.2-kilogram craft is supplied with a pressure sensor that may detect strain from a number of instructions and an hooked up fibreglass cage that’s coated in both sticky tape or gauze soaked in a sugar-water answer that collects free particles, together with these left by animals.

The drone is guided by distant management in direction of a department and when it’s inside a brief distance, an computerized management system takes over. It makes use of information from the pressure sensor to steer into the department arduous sufficient to gather samples.

After a short while, the drone pulls away from the department and returns to the bottom, the place individuals can take away the samples for evaluation.

Mintchev says much less is thought concerning the communities dwelling in bushes than these in water techniques and soil.

“They’re a hotspot for biodiversity and they’re not well understood because there’s this problem of accessibility: how to get there in order to get the samples,” he says. “Of course, you can send a climber there. But you don’t necessarily always want to do that.”

The drone can go to a number of outer branches on a single tree, however Mintchev needs to develop a tool that may push its approach deeper into the cover to gather samples there too.