Monitoring domestic ungulates in Doñana N.P.

Throughout the month of September 2009 we conducted a flightcampaign in Doñana, in order to evaluate the usefulness of UAS for the control and monitoring of domestic ungulates.
We believe that the interest of this work is twofold:
On the one hand, farmers who own cattle, sheep and horses in the park have a need to locate their animals and see that they are in safe and in good condition. The development of UAS as a tool could facilitate their work, not only to these farmers in the area, but perhaps also extended to owners of large or less accessible farms in other areas where it is not easy to check the animals conventionally.
Moreover, researchers and managers of Doñana are also interested in knowing the location and distribution of livestock in the protected space, to study the possible effects on vegetation and other variables needed for control and management.
In this case we worked with conventional radio controlled planes in visual range, as it was mainly to test different cameras.
After numerous tests, we determine the most appropriate settings for the cameras to distinguish different species and at least differentiate animals by color patterns and age ranges.