LAST WINTER, ASmeteorologists warned ofa monster El Niño, researchers at the Nature Conservancy in California prepared to mobilize. El Niño promised to bring in king tides that would raise the sea level by as much as one foot above normal during high tide, causing flooding along the coastline that researchers could study as a preview of climate change-induced sea level rise. But when a king tide arrives, it floods lots of pockets along the coastline at once. So they decided to try a new, distributed surveillance strategy: commercial drones, co-opted from a gung-ho statewide network of citizen scientists.
The plan had a lot of advantages. In January 2016, when the program started,Nature Conservancyresearchers would have had to get pilot licenses in order to fly drones themselves. Private, recreational drone pilots have far fewer restrictions. But the plan hiccuped because though the drone operators collected thousands of beach photos, none were taken of the flooding during the king tides’ brief windows. The Nature Conservancy had managed to recruit citizen scientists, but failed to properly coordinate the data collection.