Exploring the opportunities and risks of aerial monitoring for biodiversity conservation

Drones are unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) whose technology has evolved rapidly over the past 15 years. Increasingly used in conservation to manage and monitor biodiversity, drones offer rich capabilities to observe in difficult terrain, have relatively affordable hardware costs and are likely to continue to proliferate rapidly in the years ahead. Drones are useful for tasks as diverse as monitoring wildlife poaching and illegal timber extraction, managing ecotourism and disaster responses, and tracking the regeneration or degradation of forests, and offer potential for more specialised tasks as their sensory payloads are developed. However, although associated technical issues and applications have been explored in wide-ranging ways within conservation science, there has been relatively little social-scientific engagement with drones to date. This leaves a gap surrounding the potential social benefits and risks of drones, as well as in interdisciplinary conversations. This introduction is the first of four papers under the heading ‘Drone ecologies’, building on an interdisciplinary workshop held under the same name at the University of Bristol in July 2021. Expanding from the plenary dialogues that opened this workshop, this introduction explores what interdisciplinary perspectives on drones can offer in addressing global social and ecological challenges, drawing on expertise from the fields of conservation biology, human and physical geography, rainforest ecology and environmental systems. Setting out the aims of the overall special collection, we review here the ways that drones are being used, and might be used, in biodiversity conservation, setting out important considerations to minimise risks of inadvertent harms

Critical solutions in topologically gauged N=8 CFTs in three dimensions

In this paper we discuss some special (critical) background solutions that arise in topological gauged ${\mathcal N}=8$ three-dimensional CFTs with SO(N) gauge group. These solutions solve the TMG equations (containing the parameters $\mu$ and $l$) for a certain set of values of $\mu l$ obtained by varying the number of scalar fields with a VEV. Apart from Minkowski, chiral round $AdS_3$ and null-warped $AdS_3$ (or Schr\"odinger(z=2)) we identify also a more exotic solution recently found in $TMG$ by Ertl, Grumiller and Johansson. We also discuss the spectrum, symmetry breaking pattern and the supermultiplet structure in the various backgrounds and argue that some properties are due to their common origin in a conformal phase. Some of the scalar fields, including all higgsed ones, turn out to satisfy three-dimensional singleton field equations. Finally, we note that topologically gauged ${\mathcal N}=6$ ABJ(M) theories have a similar, but more restricted, set of background solutions.Comment: 34 pages, v2: minor corrections, note about a new solution added in final section, v3: two footnotes adde

Baby de Sitter black holes and dS3_3/CFT2_2

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe