Sky Guardians: Revolutionizing Wildlife Monitoring with Drones and IoT by Dennis Drost

Company started by using drones to monitor and deter geese from farmlands, causing millions in annual crop damage

Traditional geese deterrent methods (hunting, scarecrows, gas cannons) become ineffective within weeks as geese adapt quickly

Developed IoT sensors using Raspberry Pis, microphones and machine learning to detect geese presence through audio recognition and automatically alert drone pilots

System evolved from basic prototypes to weatherproof units with solar power, capable of 24/7 monitoring across hundreds of hectares

Infrastructure runs on AWS using containers, Lambda functions, and automatic scaling to process audio data through ML models

Solution proved more effective over time, contrary to other methods - reduced required drone flights from 6-8 to 2-3 times daily

Key learnings: Start simple, test in real conditions early, iterate based on actual problems rather than theoretical ones

Technical approach: Converting audio to spectrograms for ML analysis, achieved >70% accuracy in geese detection

Focus shifted from drone automation to sensor networks as core business after discovering gap in real-time wildlife monitoring market

Project demonstrated viability of combining IoT/ML technology with traditional agriculture while maintaining regular employment