Detecting nests of lapwing birds with the aid of a small unmanned aerial vehicle with thermal camera

Due to increasingly dense agricultural land use, many ground breeding birds are threatened with extinction or near threatened. We present a new method, to detect lapwing and other ground breeding bird nests. A small UAV with a thermal camera is suitable to detect a lapwing nest from a flight altitude of 40 m. With the aid of a special thermal camera image preprocessing algorithm the contrast could be enhanced by 10 to 50% which improves the detectability of nests. We successfully demonstrated, that we detected 93% of the known nests. This paper describes and analyzes the necessary conditions for optimal lapwing nest detection with a UAV borne thermal camera.