Raine Island is located on the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), approximately 620 kilometres north-west of Cairns. It supports the world’s largest remaining green turtle nesting population and is the most important seabird rookery in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. The vegetated coral cay is just 21 hectares in size but holds significant environmental and cultural values. The entire island is a protected national park (for scientific purposes) and is not accessible to the public.

However, changes in the island’s landscape have caused tidal inundation—killing newly laid eggs which cannot survive underwater—and causing as many as 2,000 adult turtles to die (in a season) from overturning and entrapment in rocky cliffs and from heat exhaustion on the nesting beach. The Raine Island recovery project aims to protect and restore the island’s critical habitat to ensure the future of key marine species, including green turtles and seabirds. As such, a range of approaches have been employed, from manual intervention to the use of robotic drones and computer vision, to protect and assess the management actions taking place.

Drones are a key technology being used to measure and assess landscape topography and changes over time, as well as to collect imagery of seabirds, turtles and sharks for population analysis. A range of collaborators have been using the technology and have created a world-first operating procedure for the use of drones for scientific use on conservation areas such as Raine Island. Computer vision is now being used to facilitate the automated counting of animals under all weather conditions, and day and night, to allow timely assessment of remediation actions between field campaigns.