We are pleased to announce our latest publication on the use of drones for dugong research in India. This is the first time an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle has been used in the country to assess marine mammal populations. We also detected several other species of conservation importance while conducting these surveys. This work paves way for more detailed systematic surveys in the future to estimate dugongs and other marine megafauna populations along the vast Indian coastline. 

Sagar Rajpurkar, Anant Pande, Sajal Sharma, Swapnali Gole, Sohini Dudhat, J. A. Johnson, K. Sivakumar (2021) Light-weight unmanned aerial vehicle surveys detect dugongs and other globally threatened marine species from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India. Current Science, 121(2).