Whereas a koala just looks like this is hot blob sitting in the fork of a tree. For example, a brushtail possum won't have this really hot tail, it'll actually look like the brush that you see with your eyes on the thermal imagery. Ryan Witt: Yeah, you can see quite interesting thermal blooms. Robyn Williams: I see, they're that accurate, are they? ![]() But so would a greater glider, so how do you know the difference? And often you can just drop elevation just slightly and see a tail, and koalas don't have tails, of course. How do you know it's a koala? And we've found that some of the ways that you can tell are koalas will be there an hour later. Sometimes we have greater gliders, which can be confusing 60 metres in the air when you've got the sensor pointing down. ![]() Ryan Witt: You do, you have hot possums, you have hot bats. Robyn Williams: You don't have hot possums up there as well, do you? And so we start most of our surveys at last light or just after dark, put the drone up, and then we fly in a lawnmower pattern, with the sensor pointing down, trying to find a needle in a haystack. And so it's really important to get that right. So you actually need the habitat to be quite cold to get the difference between the canopy and the hot koala at the top of the canopy or maybe even down lower. We use drones that are equipped with thermal imaging sensors and we use these at night. Ryan Witt: I guess the short answer is thermal imagery. If you use a drone, and you're up above the forest, how on earth can you see that there's a well-hidden koala down there? ![]() Dr Ryan Witt is using drones to count them in various regions, and he's based at the University of Newcastle. To start, are koalas endangered or not? Well, the answer is it depends where they are in Australia. Robyn Williams: All those icons, human ones, and so we turn to another, a marsupial icon which still has mysteries.
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