Thanks to The Nature Conservancy’s Cool Green Science team for helping us realize we almost missed this story:

Flight Over the Bas-Ogooué: Using Drones to Map Gabon’s Wetlands

BY JUSTINE E. HAUSHEER

How do you map a nearly inaccessible 9,000-square-kilometer African wetland that is home to hippos, forest elephants, crocodiles, and the notorious Gaboon viper?

Enter the drones.

Nature Conservancy scientists are using unmanned aerial vehicles to create the first-ever detailed wetlands habitat map of coastal Gabon, in collaboration with scientists from NASA, and other conservation groups working in Gabon.

A Wild River in a Wild Country

Forests cover 85 percent of Gabon, making it the world’s second most forested country. And those forests are home to about half the world’s population of forest elephants. Gabon also has one of the lowest population densities in Africa, with a majority of it’s citizens living in urban areas.

“In Gabon, wildlife literally spills out from the rainforest onto the beach,” says Steve Schill, a senior scientist with the Conservancy’s Caribbean program who’s been providing technical support to the Gabon program for the past 2.5 years. “It’s the only place in the world where you can see elephants and water buffalo roaming the beach and hippos in the surf.”

Gabon’s amazing biodiversity is protected in a network of 13 national parks and nine Ramsar sites — protected areas designated under an international wetlands conservation convention. The Gabonese national park agency (ANPN) is responsible for managing these areas, but they’re hampered by the fact that no detailed maps exist for any of these wetlands. And proper conservation is impossible without knowing what’s there in the first place.

That’s where Schill and the Conservancy team come in. Working with the Caribbean program, Schill developed an innovative drone monitoring program to map everything from coral growth to mangrove health. Now, he’s bringing that expertise to Gabon to map the country’s largest Ramsar site — the Bas-Ogooué.

“This is one of the last intact great rivers of Africa and a tremendous conservation opportunity,” says Schill. The Ogooué River drains an area the size of Colorado and feeds thousands of square kilometers of wetlands. Schill says that it also provides critical ecosystem services, like water purification and groundwater storage, and delivers an incredible amount of water to the coastal wetlands. And the wetlands have never been mapped before…

Read the whole article here.