Between monitoring and surveillance: Geographies of emerging drone technologies in contemporary conservation

Abstract

Conservation has employed technologies for monitoring and visual capture since its inception in the nineteenth century. Since then, the capacities of conservation technologies have developed considerably, affording a wide range of data relating to ecological change and biodiversity loss. However, new technologies introduce fresh ethical and political issues into environmental protection, especially as they can be used – deliberately or accidentally – to collect information about human activities. This potential is important, given that many areas of biodiversity protection are also areas of longstanding conflict. We focus here on the political and ethical implications surrounding drones, which collect photographic and video footage that can include images of humans. We review approaches to technology, visuality, and surveillance across and beyond environmental geography over the last two decades, teasing out conceptual approaches that support a nuanced and critical analysis of conservation drones. Our analysis focuses on the ways that conservation drones alter (i) processes of decision-making, (ii) dynamics of fearmongering and control, (iii) processes of securitisation in protected areas, (iv) the production and circulation of (racial) stereotypes, and (v) the practices and outcomes of data justice. We unpack these themes through three case studies from our own fieldwork, clarifying the range of intentional and non-intentional political outcomes that emerge, and ethical themes that will be vital to explore further in the future.

I Introduction

What insights can environmental geography offer to the rapid incorporation of surveillance technologies, including drones, into the everyday activities of biodiversity conservation? What analytical questions are raised within recent accounts of the ethics and politics of data technologies, and how do these help us think through the implications of practically incorporating these technologies into conservation activities? Finally, how might a close analysis of the use of drones in conservation environments change the way that we, as environmental geographers, think about the spaces they help produce? These are the questions that set the scope of this paper, which focuses on analysing the incorporation of drone technologies into everyday monitoring activities, within the spatial projects of global biodiversity conservation.

Since their first experimental modification for conservation applications in 2012, the use of lightweight unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones ¹ , has expanded exponentially (Manfreda et al. 2018; Nowak, Dziób and Bogawski 2019). Effectively devices for carrying equipment – primarily sensors – drones are used in conservation for, inter alia, data collection for wildlife monitoring and management; ecosystem monitoring; law enforcement; environmental management; and disaster response (Jiménez López and Mulero-Pázmány 2019). One reason that drones are increasingly popular in conservation is their relative availability and affordability, especially when compared to alternative data collection methodologies, such as helicopters or satellite imaging (Manfreda et al. 2018) ² . Both fixed-wing drones (which resemble gliders) and rotary-wing drones or multirotors (which use propellers to generate upward thrust) are used, according to the terrain, while the ongoing miniaturisation of sensors has greatly increased conservation's capacity to generate new forms of data at higher spatial and temporal resolutions.

The rapid transformation of conservation institutions and their practice in recent years makes the (intended and unintended) implications of conservation monitoring an area for urgent ethical and political attention. Monitoring can establish new kinds of power relations, as sanctions may be imposed for non-compliance, while social exclusion may result from non-participation (Fairhead, Leach and Scoones 2012), or the uneven availability of machine parts and facilities for repair (Millner 2020). We might ask questions about who performs new kinds of monitoring labour (Simlai et al. 2023) and how it is remunerated. There are also new risks and concerns associated with drone technologies specifically, having been innovated historically for contexts of state surveillance and/or spatial control (Grewal 2017). Drones collect photographic and video footage that can include images of humans. While drones are mostly used to monitor vegetation change, they have, more recently, been incorporated into anti-poaching and illegal logging operations (Jiménez López and Mulero-Pázmány 2019). Beyond the potential for drones to compound stereotypes here (e.g., of who or what a poacher is), official park guards have, in some contexts, used drones as part of a sustained campaign designed to create fear among rural communities in some protected areas (Massé 2018; Simlai 2022). Meanwhile, the automation of decision-making through such technologies fosters ‘algorithmic’ forms of governance, where decisions are made based on automatic, calculative processing of data, obscuring how ‘objective’ practices can reinforce stereotypes or bias (Adams 2019). In sum, more attention is needed to the ‘uneven distribution and effects’ of the ‘aerial-techno-possibilities’ offered by drones (Jackman and Brickell 2022, 16) in domestic contexts like conservation.

What remains under-examined in this emerging scene are the political and social implications of these rapidly transforming monitoring practices (although see Arts, van der Wal and Adams 2015; Fish and Richardson 2022; Millner 2020; Sandbrook 2015; Simlai and Sandbrook 2021). This is vital, given the uncertainty about when monitoring becomes surveillance in protected areas, and what protections are required such that data collected for one purpose cannot be used for another. Yet critical readings of drones can also underplay their potential to democratise conservation practice in new kinds of citizen science (Gabrys 2020; Jepson and Ladle 2015), and novel applications in environmental justice projects, such as counter-mapping or Indigenous-led cartography projects (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2017; Sauls et al. 2023). It is important to understand how and when drone technologies hold potential for changing decision-making; for deepening atmospheres of fear; for aiding securitisation; for entrenching stereotypes, and for establishing environmental justice. In other words, we need a differential understanding of the incorporation of drones into conservation practices.

Recent conversations within and around environmental geography are well-positioned to guide this analysis, especially at the intersection of themes of technology, visuality and surveillance. We identify five overlapping areas of scholarship to guide deeper analysis of conservation contexts: (1) fresh work rethinking decision-making in conservation via concepts of digital ecologies; (2) ‘volumetric’ geographies that highlight the height and volume of drones’ power relations; (3) political ecological approaches to conservation that follow new trends toward securitisation; (4) (feminist) surveillance studies approaches to the role of digital technologies in strengthening stereotypes and discrimination; and (5) approaches to counter-mapping and data justice. Each of these areas is reviewed in the following five sections. In dialogue, these literatures make clear the specific questions we need to ask of drones in their conservation uses. This is important, as reading conservation drones through just one of these literatures may result in a simplified picture. For example, while aerial and drone technologies have been extensively conceptualised in contexts of new warfare, their potential for surveillance in environmental settings has been less well explored (Massé 2018). Meanwhile, a focus on the way drones as war-devices produce atmospheres of fear can pull attention away from their role as a tool in the defence of Indigenous and communally-managed territories (Sauls et al. 2023). By bringing these literatures into dialogue, we advance a conceptualisation of the diverse potentials of conservation drones, while identifying routes toward more just or ethical practice on the ground. These are the goals of this paper. Building from incipient themes in the literatures mentioned above (decision-making, fear, securitisation, stereotyping, and data justice) allows us to subsequently differentiate intended and unintended outcomes of drone use in conservation by actors across geographic scales.

Beyond various binaries proposed to differentiate conservation ‘surveillance’ from innocuous conservation ‘monitoring’ (e.g., surveillance focuses on humans and policing; monitoring on nonhumans and environmental goals) we highlight the ‘accidental’ political implications of using drones. This is to say, we make clear that the political effects of drones are not tied to the intentions of particular users and may extend far beyond original designs (Adams 2019). In section 6, we build on our literature reviews to illustrate how both intentional and unintentional potentials take shape through conservation drones. This is achieved through the analysis of three case studies taken from the authors’ fieldwork, in Guatemala, Borneo, and India. In section 7 we draw together this analysis to lay out the differential implications of using drones in conservation spaces. In concluding, we argue, with feminist surveillance studies scholars, for a politicised approach that considers all forms of watching and monitoring as holding potential for sedimenting, or unsettling, wider narratives about people and places. Only from this starting point, we suggest, can we appreciate the ways that intended and unintended outcomes of using drones configure in specific power geometries and in particular places.

II Decision-making: conservation technologies and digital ecologies

The regulation of nonhuman environments is increasingly digitised, following wider trends in technological innovation (Gabrys et al. 2022; Goldstein and Nost 2022, 59). Social scientists question the authority transferred to digital technologies, as devices like drones take on new roles in ‘automated’ decision-making pathways – a process that Adams (2019) terms ‘algorithmic’ governance. While it may be speedier to allow data thresholds to ‘push’ particular outcomes, automated conservation governance can both entrench and obscure the values determining which forms of life get to count, and how. This is especially true as neoliberal models become normative in global conservation, prioritising private property relations over communal arrangements and associating nature-saving with financial incentives (Fairhead et al., 2012). For example, Earth Observation technologies tend to be considered neutral when new protected areas are zoned, or species protection plans are drawn up. However, the increasingly agile models for business incorporated into ‘green investment’ strategies may ground and naturalise capital accumulation priorities into aspects of programming itself, such that the ways areas are mapped (e.g., colour differentiations, borders and zones) and associated decision-pathways reflect these priorities (Alvarez León 2022).

It is thus important to interrogate who is using digital technologies within biodiversity conservation, what kind of data they can produce, and how data production circuits are being wired into wider structures of conservation governance. We might, alongside this attention, consider the ways that ‘situated lifeworlds’ are being reshaped, and how the technological artefacts themselves are being ‘rescripted’ (Mahony 2021, 592). This is especially relevant given the military contexts in which many digital technologies and associated data systems have been experimentally developed, including drones. As Paul Edwards (1996) emphasises in his Science and Technology Studies (STS)-informed social history of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the prioritisation of speed in military contexts can be seen as a ‘value’ carried forward in AI designs and decision-making capacities – just as the need for an aerial overview in contemporary warfare has influenced both military and hobbyist drone designs (Parks 2017). While this is not to say that the same machines cannot be used successfully in establishing – and indeed, in re-scripting drones into – new kinds of data justice (see section 5), environmental geographers are well-positioned to explore the implications for decision-making in biodiversity conservation, as well as ‘how technoscience [is] shap[ing] the questions we ask’ (Lehman and Johnson 2022, 27). Within this section, we use ‘digital ecologies’ as shorthand to refer to the scholarship within and beyond environmental geography that draws on STS perspectives to think through the changes to data production and data sharing dynamics in social terms. Digital ecologies scholarship analyses how new kinds of data circuits transform decision-making pathways and outcomes, and the ways power relations shift and reform. Against a backdrop of rapid technological changes, this scholarship emphasises that the choices over which data to collect, how to interpret it, and even how to store or share it, remain social and contextual even where this sociality is obscured (Johnson, Strawhacker and Pulsifer 2022). Moreover, such choices are recognised to frequently reproduce pre-existing power relations and inequalities within knowledge production and governance, as well as asymmetries in funding and international support (Nost and Goldstein 2022).

When translated from one social context to another, the values and assumptions underpinning interpretation of data may also shift considerably – they do not necessarily travel. Here the notion of data ‘infrastructures’ can be used to distinguish and describe the different networks and relationships brought into play and connected via digital technologies, as well as new interfaces between them. Infrastructures refer to devices and parts with their functional capacities, but also ‘the community practices, relations, and modes of organizing’ that set technologies into relation (Gabrys and Pritchard 2022, 105). In recognition of the rising importance of digital data within conservation decision-making, we might incorporate an appreciation of the way that emergent data technologies ‘come to distribute valuable things and ideas and organise the relationships among people, organisations, and governments’ (Gallagher 2022, 177). The production of ‘official’ knowledge can be understood thus as a data infrastructure that works by classifying some data sources (often white, male, ‘scientific’) as ‘experts’ while others are silenced or cast as ‘informal’ (Vermeylen, Davies and van der Horst 2012). Yet we can also conceptualise citizen and community action networks as data infrastructures, thinking of the alternative monitoring, analysis and dissemination processes that take place on environmental pollution, for example, in the name of environmental justice (Gabrys and Pritchard 2022, 105).

Yet what matters most for understanding how and when digital ecologies alter conservation decision-making is the ways new value-sets come to re-script the destination of conservation data. This may happen either as data created for other purposes enters new infrastructures, or as new data collection circuits are created. For example, military and/or capitalist values might reframe how species count data-sets are used (e.g., to justify the creation of new ‘zones’ and borders in protected areas), or, new kinds of forest monitoring may be authorised, linked with surveillance agendas (see section 3).

The incorporation of drone technologies into conservation governance is a case in point. Drones have been introduced into biodiverse environments over or alongside other remote sensing technologies precisely because they allow individual organisms to be tracked, recorded, and counted at a closer range ³ . At a broader spatial level, this allows for the monitoring of changes in habitats and ecosystems – processes such as deforestation, or shifts in community composition (e.g., Tobler et al. 2008). Yet what is new and distinct about the data produced by drones is its portability in conjunction with its intimacy, which is to say, the ‘close in’ view they afford, allowing for different kinds of narratives to be told about biodiverse natures (Fish, Garrett and Case 2017). This means that the visual capture of human activities, accidental or designed, can not only be collected but also shared with other actors; indeed there is even a moral imperative for doing so, where ‘nature’ is seen to be threatened, for example, by acts of illegal poaching (Lunstrum and Ybarra 2018). Thus, the integration of drones into conservation activities may widen the potential for conservation actors to become involved in policing and monitoring at other scales, or in the making and disciplining of protected areas themselves. We explore further implications of this ‘portable’ dimension in the following four sections.

III Fear: volumetric geographies

The literature on drones within wider practices of war (e.g., Crandall 2015; Graham 2004; Gregory 2011) focuses more narrowly on the military designs of drones and the ways these spill over into all aspects of everyday life. While this literature focuses less on non-military uses of drones, it does shed important light on the ways that drones affect atmospheres of feeling in place, an insight that is very relevant for understanding what happens when drones are used – even for conservation purposes – in areas with histories of conflict (Millner 2020). Distinctly from the digital ecologies scholarship, the key analytical point here is that drones may not only transfer values from one site of production to another, but atmospheres, specifically of fear. In warfare, these atmospheres are part of the establishment of power relations – specifically via the assertion of a ‘view from above’ that cannot be escaped (Adey 2015). Analysing the use of aeroplanes and satellites as well as drones in warfare, as a means of obtaining spatial dominance, political geographers and sociologists make clear that what is unique about this power relation is its ‘volumetric’ dimension: the ways it makes use of height and volume (Jackman and Squire 2021). Volume refers to ways that aerial navigation, surveillance technologies, and relevant legal architectures articulate place and space distinctively from the management of ground-level flows or the making of maps (Braun 2000; Elden 2013). Through the deployment of technologies like drones a sense of being always watched – and thus potentially, shot or killed – is inculcated, enabling the strengthening or making of borders and the enforcement of particular behaviours (Adey 2010; Chandler 2016; Crandall 2015).

In conservation contexts, concepts of volumetrics consequently highlight the forms of (geopolitical) power that utilise height and volume to obtain dominance in the name of conservation. Thus, we witness examples of drones being used within terror campaigns on the residents of protected areas, as developed in section 6. In such cases the atmospheres of war are directly imported into conservation settings, using the official guise of the park guard, for example, to terrorise with an air of legitimacy (Simlai and Sandbrook 2021). Where conservation policing builds on prior histories of making conservation areas as places for the consolidation of state power (e.g., on forests, see Peluso 1991; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2011), the use of visual technologies like drones can be expected to entrench racial stereotypes and associated forms of policing (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015).

Yet we might also consider how such ‘overview’ technologies assert spatial authority in more mundane, if equally far-reaching ways (Goldstein and Faxon 2022; Mahony 2022, 708; see also Jackman and Squire, 2021). The capacity of drones to see from above and record footage of humans and nonhumans alike makes them importance surveillance technologies – tools for collecting incriminating evidence but also for making humans feel watched. For such reasons, Adams (2019) calls surveillance technologies a central operating system of biopower. Biopower, as a mode of maintaining power over bodies via the production of knowledge about them (e.g., as ‘health’), can be exerted in conservation precisely by rendering some human and nonhuman bodies as ‘insiders’ to be protected by policies, and others as sources of potential harm or threat (Fish and Richardson 2022). While surveillance can mean the close observation of any object, person, or group, surveillance in the consolidation of biopower refers more specifically to forms of looking that seek to identify, define, and reduce potential sources of ‘deviance’ for state (or geopolitical) interests.

While the view from above is an essential part of military designs that transfer to non-military spaces, it is just as important to appreciate the ‘elementality’ of these volumes (Adey 2015; Fish 2022). Far from being disembodied or remote, the view from above can be seen as a recomposition of volumetric airspace in its relation to other surfaces, blending the intimate with the global (Parks 2017). Thus, the sensors employed with drones do not only produce ‘birds-eye view’ images but revisualisations of protected and lived environments in terms of species variation, heat, and below-earth structures. ⁴ The composite images produced by assembling such sense-data into orthomosaics or video footage can produce a fresh sense of the forest as home, but also provide an intimate insight into villages, homes, and private spaces (Millner 2020).

The ambivalence of drone technologies therefore invites caution. Even as they contain rich possibilities for mapping and monitoring, their political function remains obstinately undecided, and often overdetermined by prevailing territorial interests (Massé 2018). Under particular conditions, using drones within conservation holds the potential to create an atmosphere of constant surveillance in protected areas, supporting a cartographic imagination that makes acts of violence (e.g., in the name of ‘saving nature’) seem legitimate (Gregory 2011). Political geographers emphasise that ‘spatial curiosity’ and ‘power sensitivity’ are vital to explore these issues as they emerge (Klauser and Pedrozo 2015). In practice, this means becoming aware, as scientists, but also as collectives interested in biodiversity conservation, in two transformations brought about by the incorporation of new technologies. Firstly, drones and aerial technologies hold a problematic potential to create fear and cultivate animosity, even where this is not intended. And secondly, drones, as surveillance technologies, and the visual data they produced, may become incorporated into strategies for territorial interests and geopolitical dominance. This may be the case when conservation park rangers are asked to use technologies like drones to monitor groups classed as ‘risky’; when drone data relating to forest species is passed to state police for the detection of illegal activities; or indeed, when private companies contract drones to monitor the activities of rural communities in areas under speculation. New conceptual lenses for understanding these shifts in the global governance of conservation are unpacked further in the next section.

IV Securitisation: political ecologies of conservation technologies

Within political ecology literature, it is similarly important that devices supposedly intended for wildlife monitoring are also used for disciplining people. Yet, where the previous section focused on the spatial implications of using machines designed with military intentions, political ecologies of conservation tend to foreground the longer colonial histories of global conservation and their interaction with changing political-economic and state rationales. Here, protected areas are cast as processes of territorialisation that create bounded spaces around concentrations of biodiversity, to make it easier to control, secure, and surveil, as part of broader logics (Fairhead, Leach and Scoones 2012; Massé 2018). For example, in southern Africa, a ‘war on poaching’ (Duffy 2014; Neumann 2004) and discourses of ‘poachers-as-terrorists’ have rendered hunters and migrants targets of state violence by using drones to capture compromising images and generate hysteria about their potential risk to wildlife (Büscher 2016). Thus it becomes important to consider how drones may entrench already-racialised and gendered modes of looking, for example, by reinforcing stereotypes of what a poacher looks like (Büscher 2016; Lunstrum 2017).

For political ecologists, the rise of surveillance technologies forms part of broader trends toward securitisation of protected areas as part of a neocolonial regime of power that rebrands potential insurgents as potential nature destroyers (Adams 2019; Kelly and Ybarra 2016; Massé 2018; Millner 2020; Shrestha and Lapeyre 2018; Simlai 2015). ‘Green militarisation’ refers, here, to the elaboration of state and geopolitical interests through the appropriation of global conservation agendas for specifically militarised projects, including the introduction of armed forces, checkpoints, and surveillance practices in the name of biodiversity protection (Lunstrum 2014; Massé and Lunstrum 2016). For some, this trend is linked with the longer historical project of conservation as a consolidation of biopower for (formerly) colonial powers (e.g., Büscher and Ramutsindela 2015; Fish and Richardson 2022). For others, it is rather the moral association of conservation with protection and progress that makes it open to co-optation by accumulation and securitisation agendas alike (Massé and Lunstrum 2016). Either way, critical scholars note that the imperative to protect biodiversity is increasingly being associated (whether purposefully, or unintentionally) with calls to police and contain those long considered ‘risky’ by state or neo-colonial actors (Amador-Jiménez and Millner, 2021; Bocarejo and Ojeda 2016).

The wider array of wildlife-tracking and surveillance technologies seems likely to foster increased powers to control and order space in protected areas. While using such technologies does not pre-determine ends of increased spatial control, claims Adams (2019), it does make such outcomes seem more ‘natural’ and ‘neutral’. Over time, the discourse used to justify these interventions can, further, lead to blurring between those considered potential ‘nature-destroyers’ and potential ‘terrorists’ (Lunstrum and Ybarra 2018; Ybarra 2012).

Meanwhile, drone technologies lend themselves to securitisation practices, in, for example, their potential to capture images of people as well as wildlife. In some cases, the capture of footage of human bodies is deliberate. People can be targeted by conservation monitoring devices as subjects of research in areas of conservation concern. Monitoring devices also collect data about humans to support conservation goals directly, as a deterrent, or by helping to apprehend and convict those who carry out illegal behaviours (e.g., Hambrecht et al. 2019). The combination of drones with automated AI software to identify humans in images also enables new methods for identifying illegal hunters, with alerts passed on to ground-based operatives almost instantaneously (e.g., Bondi et al. 2018). On the other hand, images of humans may be collected accidentally. Writing about camera traps, Sandbrook, Luque-Lora and Adams (2018) describe this inadvertent monitoring as ‘human bycatch’, analogous to the bycatch of non-target species in fisheries. In a survey of 235 authors of published camera trap papers, they found that 91.9% of camera trapping projects did not intend to take pictures of people, but 90.1% of projects nonetheless did take pictures of people. Many projects that accidentally photographed people then used those pictures for conservation actions, such as sharing them with the police or conservation authorities. What becomes critical is therefore not only legislation over the collection of images, but over the sharing of footage collected, for example, between conservation organisations and the police.

V Stereotyping: studies of surveillance

Conservation has used monitoring technologies since its earliest days in the nineteenth century, when analogue tools such as notepads and binoculars formed part of the equipment of the fieldworker. F.W. Champion, a British forest officer in colonial India, used tripwire cameras for photographing and monitoring wildlife in the early 1900s (Champion 1934), paving the way for modern day camera traps. It is clearly the visual capture capacities of emerging monitoring technologies that present new possibilities for surveillance, as made clear in the political and environmental geographies, political ecologies and STS research we have reviewed. Yet an important but overlooked point that emerges is that what counts as monitoring and surveillance within different disciplinary fields is not the same. The word surveillance tends to refer to modes of looking at people in the social sciences, but within the natural sciences it may also be applied to the monitoring of nonhuman life – e.g., disease surveillance, or invasive species surveillance. For ecologists, the focused data collection of monitoring is usually contrasted with a less targeted form of data collection carried out almost for its own sake, known as (omnibus) surveillance (Nichols and Williams 2006). This is certainly not what political ecologists are concerned about when writing of green securitisation, or what political geographers mean when they raise concern with drone volumetrics. Surveillance studies, a sub-discipline long concerned with the power relations established through visual technologies such as CCTV, offers to enrich and clarify such dialogues, due to its longstanding interest in surveillance as a banal activity with complex power dynamics (see for example Ball and Wood 2013; Browne, Klauser and DM 2022; Pauschinger and Klauser 2020; Schnepf 2019). Like those reviewed in the previous two sections, surveillance studies scholars work to explore the politics embedded across forms and technologies of looking, but they are above all concerned with the composition of visuality itself, via technologies, discourses, and practices. In other words, this literature seeks to analyse the power relations of looking and seeing more generally, and in contexts prior to the introduction of technologies like drones. Young et al. (2022) have recently adapted this theoretical repertoire for the arena of conservation, defining this specific application as ‘ecosurveillance’. Here, drones can be seen to reinforce stereotypes of risky outsiders, but do not themselves introduce them.

From the surveillance studies perspective, ‘surveillance involves paying close and sustained attention to another person’ (Macnish 2019: n.p.): it concerns simply being watched, often unknowingly, in myriad ways in everyday life. Who is doing the surveilling, or why, is not critical to the definition of surveillance – as Macnish (2019: n.p.) writes:

Surveillance is itself an ethically neutral concept. What determines the ethical nature of a particular instance of surveillance will be the considerations which follow, such as justified cause, the means employed, and questions of proportionality.

The importance of power relations is also essential to the definition of ‘sousveillance’ within this literature – literally, surveillance from below – used to refer to the use of technology by relatively less powerful groups, for example taking videos of police brutality. Surveillance studies scholars have debated extensively the distinction between surveillance and sousveillance, although Thomsen (2019) concludes that there is no real means of distinguishing the two, preferring to speak instead of different forms of surveillance. What is critical here is not so much how data are produced, but how stereotypes become embedded and contested through the production and circulation of data. As in Foucault's (2008) account of the panopticon and the productive potential of surveillance as a technology of statecraft – a key reference for surveillance studies – the key point is the modes of looking, describing, and normalising that any technology enables, which informs how data are used to infer criminality or deviance.

In feminist surveillance studies, a focus on always-already framed ways of seeing grows even more important, informing their central claim that many of our foundational structural systems institutionalise disenfranchisement precisely through systems of surveillance. It is a premise of feminist surveillance studies that racism (and sexism, disablism, etc.) are embedded both in targeted surveillance on groups and in forms of recording or visualising that are seemingly ordinary. This means that the production of ‘official’ knowledge, when it comes to vulnerable bodies especially, is always bound up with gendered, sexualised, and racialised ways of seeing (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015). The mere act of reviewing visual data of human (and potentially nonhuman) activity in everyday environments is necessarily implicated in reproducing forms of ‘gaze’ (Mulvey 1989). This is what constitutes surveillance for (feminist) surveillance studies scholars.

This literature therefore adds theoretical nuance to the debates outlined in this paper. With surveillance studies scholars, we do not claim that drones are not what introduce surveillance potentials into conservation spaces; rather, we argue that looking/seeing dynamics may be changed or intensified by using drones. To understand this, we must bring the political analysis of geopolitical and state interests into dialogue with the depth understanding of data infrastructures advocated by digital natures scholarship. This is also an important point for rethinking the meaning of ‘justice’ in such contexts.

VI Data justice: counter-mapping and community management

It was not only the potential to surveil people but also the relative affordability and adaptability of drones that led to them becoming incorporated into everyday conservation tasks in tropical forests. Critically, these characteristics have also offered new potential for counter-mapping projects led by rural communities and their organisations (notwithstanding that access to parts, training, and machines is still globally uneven). The idea and practice of counter-mapping begins from the assumption that mapping is an activity deeply entangled in power relations (Radjawali, Pye and Flitner 2017), such that maps themselves can never be seen as objective or ‘innocent images’ (Vermeylen, Davies and van der Horst 2012, 122) ⁵ . Counter-mapping using drones follows longer traditions of participatory cartography, in supplementing or contesting official maps by presenting experiential and customary knowledge, for example using geographic information system (GIS) technologies (Peluso 1995) ⁶ . Yet drones change the kinds of visual narratives that can be told about people and places, and who can present them to global audiences (Iralu 2020).

Such projects can relate to the ambitions of a broader ‘data justice’ that seeks to transform the inequalities underpinning and informing what gets considered ‘objective’ fact – and what gets excluded from it (Haraway, 2013; Pritchard et al. 2022). Environmental justice scholars have developed capacity around this area for decades, producing important datasets in relation to, for example, pollution's uneven effects or the racist biases of urban waste disposal (Walker et al. 2022). Questions of community stewardship of data are central to notions of data justice, alongside raising challenges to exclusions within official data, and interrogations of the ways value-laden decisions informing data production are kept out of view (ibid.). While we will want to interrogate the power relations and institutions surrounding the introduction of drones in protected areas, this perspective also invites us to notice that rural communities are also using drones to document incursions on Indigenous land, to direct their own conservation strategies, and produce visual evidence of the effectiveness of the same (Millner 2020; Vargas Ramirez and Paneque-Gálvez 2019).

Drones offer new material capacities for data justice as well as raising new questions for it. By placing bodies and landscapes into new relations, the specificities of drone flight allow it to animate ecological and social histories in a provoking way (Fish, Garrett and Case 2017). As such, drones also enable new ‘subversive’ uses (ibid.). For example, they were used by the Native American Sioux nation and their allies at Standing Rock to report on the scale of devastation under the planned construction of an 1172-mile oil pipeline, and to document police activity during protests (Tuck 2018). In a related sense, hybrid collectives of academics, engineers, and forest-based community groups have, across the last decade, used drones successfully to empower community-led forestry and even to defend Indigenous land threatened by external private interests (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2017; Radjawali, Pye and Flitner 2017).

Despite their potential for incorporation into security-conservation assemblages, then, surveillance technologies such as drones may contribute toward more convivial and care-full forms of conservation. Here we lean, in part, on the work of STS pioneer Donna Haraway, framing emerging technologies like drones in terms of a ‘cyborgisation’ of the human, denoting the processes through which humans, nonhumans, and technologies are entangled (Haraway 2013) ⁷ . Bringing this emphasis on reworking military architectures toward fresh potentials into dialogue with the critical readings of political geographers and political ecologists suggests a cautious optimism about using/reclaiming drones as a technology for data justice (and see Feigenbaum's (2015) ‘drone feminism’). Recently, calls have been made to engage with Black and Indigenous geographies scholarship, Black and Queer code studies, as well as work from the majority world to move beyond hegemonic myopias in such projects (Elwood and Leszczynski 2018). Here, attention to the enclosing and disciplinary role of technologies like drones is combined with explorations of tactical ‘hacking’: examples of collective efforts to reduce the grip of modern and militaristic imaginations over technological advances.

This work needs to be accompanied by critical reflection, not only on the potentials for abuse, but of the ways such technologies may reshape social contexts beyond the ways intended (Mahony 2021). As Jackman and Brickell (2022) make clear in their review, feminist geopolitics of drones will not only engage with non-military uses of drone technologies but with the ways that uneven distributions of protection, harm, precarity, and emancipation become compounded with such shifts (see also Chandler 2016). Data justice projects using drones will need to remain attentive both to new types of foreclosure, and to new ways to ensure that ‘community’ uses of drones cannot be set to other uses. The practicalities of this theme are developed further in the analysis of section 7.

VII Volumetric environmental spaces: case studies

Across the previous five sections, we have reviewed contemporary work around digital ecologies, political geographies of volume, political ecologies of conservation, surveillance studies accounts of new technologies, and new definitions of data justice. These literatures help us attend to how and when drone technologies are altering conservation geographies by drawing attention to decision-making processes, atmospheres of fear, processes of securitisation, stereotyping via visual capture and counter-mapping potentials, respectively. In the next section, these themes are brought into focus through an exploration of the intended and unintended effects of drones in three case studies. As noted in each case, the data presented was collected within three wider social-scientific projects led by three of the authors of this paper.

7.1 Using drones to create psychological terror in India

Author 4's ethnographic work in India ⁸ reveals how drones participate in green securitisation. Of the three cases presented, here it is the most sobering, showing how the militarising capacities of drones can and are being used to establish regimes of terror in the name of conservation.

The context is the Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR), a national park in the state of Uttarakhand, established in 1936 and reshaped by ecotourism and big cat protection schemes. In 2018, a drone security force was formulated by the state government, ostensibly to counter heightened instances of big cat poaching: it included new forest conservator and officer posts as well as 81 new forest guards. Here, drones are primarily deployed as a tool of conservation law enforcement: the force's explicit objective is to monitor illegal activities in the protected area and reduce illegal poaching. However, building on a history of exclusion and displacement of Indigenous people from the reserve (Strahorn 2009), and of continued policed/restricted access of local communities to forest resources (Hussain, Dasgupta and Bargali 2016; Rastogi et al. 2014), these surveillance technologies have functioned primarily to discipline local populations. At the same time, they have created and maintained landscapes of fear and fear of being watched (Author 4 2021).

Dynamics of securitisation, surveillance, and fear have been created via the production of a regime that senior members of the forest department call a form of ‘psychological terror’ – a phenomenon closely documented in the literature on drone warfare (Afxentiou 2018; Espinoza 2018). The ‘spectacle’ of fear within the CTR is configured through everyday conservation practices. For example, the drone team conducts a daily drone patrol around the Reserve's fringe villages. Each sortie lasts 15–20 min and takes place in full public view along the borders of a village and the forest. Curious residents who gather to see this drone spectacle are informed about forest laws and restrictions on forest produce collection. However, the central message of this spectacle inculcates a sense of being permanently watched amongst village residents, who live in fear of military interventions.

The impacts of drone surveillance on residents living alongside the CTR are unequally distributed, being especially intense in villages with a dominant population of marginalised groups, such as those belonging to scheduled tribes ⁹ or scheduled castes ¹⁰ . In this sense, the case also offers an example of drones affecting stereotyping dynamics. Author 4 found that powerful groups within village communities could dictate and direct who should be surveilled by drones. For instance, a village headman explained how he often directed the drone team to conduct sorties over houses of marginalised groups, while being reluctant to have the drone monitor the activities of fellow villagers belonging to his caste/other dominant castes. Such a figure would always be consulted before commencing a drone sortie in upper caste areas, in stark contrast with when flying drones along villages that were dominated by lower castes. Such ‘social sorting’ through surveillance has been well documented in the surveillance studies literature (Lyon 2007; 2010).

Senior forest officials overlooking the drone program in the CTR disregarded any concerns over infringement on the privacy of locals, as the drones were only flying above forest land, while trespassing into the protected area was illegal. However, the collection of minor forest produce, such as fodder grass and firewood, are legally permitted in the buffer zones of the CTR. For the senior management of CTR, drones were understood as tools of deterrence to be used alongside other surveillance technologies, such as remote cameras and an electronic eye system, in regimes of surveillance.

The examples in this case study depict drones as tools of coercion that contribute to a spectacle of fear in CTR, designed to control and police communities living next to the reserve. The use of drones in the CTR contribute to a surveillance regime by making certain bodies more visible and vulnerable than others, contributing to upholding structures of caste discrimination, coercion, and control. Evidencing the production of atmospheres of fear, processes of securitisation, and stereotyping via visual capture, this case demonstrates that drones can and do transfer the power dynamics of power and surveillance to conservation contexts.

7.2 Participatory mapping and ‘outsourcing’ of drones for wildlife monitoring in Borneo

On the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia, interviews conducted by author 2 ¹¹ show how drones can occupy a more ambiguous space. Academic research organisations, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), and community groups across the state of Sabah (Malaysia) and province of West Kalimantan (Indonesia) use drones to collect ecological data for activities from crocodile nest counts to forest burn scar detection, with flights taking place in state-administered protected areas, customary forests, villages and agricultural lands. Despite flying in such social spaces, drone users reported very few cases of human bycatch. However, there are instances of drone flights capturing images of people engaging in illegal activities, such as small-scale gold mining ¹² . In terms of the themes of this paper, this case offers an example of the ways drones are reconfiguring decision-making within protected areas as well as some new opportunities for data justice. Yet, as we show, critical attention is required to protect ‘scientific’ data from becoming refunctionalised within infrastructures for surveillance and policing.

The ways in which drone users deal with inadvertent human bycatch varies greatly between – and within – academic institutions and environmental research groups. Some users are committed to deleting or obscuring images that could be used to identify people, on the basis of maintaining good relationships with local communities; some quietly publish images in the form of maps and reports; and others will directly hand data to the authorities. Some interviewees framed their willingness to share data as a question of observing the law, as government agencies often require copies of data collected or must accompany field teams as a condition for permission to fly in forest reserves – a condition that creates ethical challenges for researchers. Other times people hand over potentially incriminating data voluntarily, likening the process to reporting any other ‘illegal activity’ they would see ‘walking down the street’ (interviews, July 2020). These latter instances illustrate how the final application of drone-derived data can shift significantly from the initial purpose, sliding from wildlife data capture to overt/covert human surveillance and law enforcement.

Adding a further level of complexity is the emergence of ‘drone outsourcing’ in Borneo and elsewhere, whereby private companies are contracted to perform drone operations on behalf of others, who may lack equipment or time. Large INGOs usually have the capacity to certify and equip their own drone team, while smaller NGOs and community groups may not have the financial resources for training, nor the technical resources to process large amounts of data. In these cases, contracting a third party to handle planning, data collection, and processing, is more viable. Several organisations provide such services, often drawing on film-making or scientific backgrounds. However, this outsourcing restricts a working knowledge of drones to a small group of individuals, in contrast with the increasing accessibility and autonomy that drones supposedly bring to data collection. Meanwhile, although third parties routinely engage in community consultation, they may still default to predetermined administrative mapping standards to render things ‘legible’. Those who outsource data collection also entrust ethical decisions around data handling (such as dealing with bycatch) to these contracted parties, further distancing decision-making processes from the communities and areas where drones are being flown.

While this example broadly evidences how decision-making and associated power-relations are altered within digital ecologies, it is also important to note that drones have also been incorporated into community mapping projects in Borneo, to document sustainable land management practices, or provide evidence of agricultural and extractive industries encroaching on community lands. Such methods build upon histories of counter-mapping practices in the region (De Vos 2018; Peluso 1995), and have led to the region's first ‘drone school’ at the Swandiri Institute in Pontianak, Indonesia, where communities are taught to use drones and GIS. With activists from the Swandiri Institute, one community group in Sanggau Regency, Indonesia, enacted data justice by using drone images to provide evidence to the provincial government that a bauxite mining company had illegally diverted important river tributaries. Drones enabled the community to document and contest this, despite their denied entry to the sites on the ground (see also Radjawali and Pye 2017). This new access to the aerial perspective has, however, provoked some negative reactions from groups being surveilled, with workers from the bauxite mine in Sanggau flying a helicopter low over the drone operators, echoing intimidation techniques experienced by community drone mapping projects in Peru (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2017). Other communities describe being confronted by company employees when flying drones and having to obscure the reasons for their presence, for fear of repercussions.

The examples in this case depict drones as, overall, a more ambiguous technology, with impacts defined by specific applications altering decision-makings but also with the potential to establish fear, processes of securitisation and visual stereotyping via visual capture. While demonstrating the way drones are being used to enact new economic agendas in Borneo and reconfigure decision-making networks, the case also shows examples of counter-mapping with the potential of data justice.

7.3 Rural defence in the Maya biosphere reserve, Guatemala

Author 1's ethnographic work in Guatemala ¹³ reveals distinct dynamics to the other two cases: drones were introduced primarily by new networks of community monitoring arising from collaborations between international human rights organisations, community-based forest organisations, and, since 2015, transnational institutions like the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). While these networks are not ‘outside’ the discourses of militarised conservation or the techno-scientific fields of environmental data management that has underpinned drone use traced by political ecologists and STS scholars, this case illustrates important emancipatory uses in contexts already shaped by state surveillance. Specifically, against a backdrop of long-term and systematic exclusion of Indigenous people and rural forest communities, author 1's work (see author 1 2020) suggests that the use of surveillance technologies for participatory monitoring in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) in the Petén region of Guatemala constructs a stage on which forest inhabitants can appear as rights-bearers and experts. In this sense, potentials are kept more firmly within the bracket of data justice, whilst at the same time transforming decision-making in ways that increase community participation.

The data justice aspect specifically concerns rural communities displaced by state forms of ordering and visualisation. The racialised policing of rural populations in the MBR has long been enabled through the production of the region as a space of conservation (Sundberg 2003), contributing to the violent repression of Indigenous groups (Ybarra 2012), and migrant communities (Devine 2014). Through the creation of new park borders in 1990, growing military presence (the elite Interagency Task Force ‘IATF Jaguar’ was introduced in 2018 to monitor the Petén through the use of helicopters and infra-red cameras), and new stop-and-search points, the disciplinary actions of governmental authorities on non-compliant communities was further enabled through forest monitoring technologies (see Devine 2018). However, drone technologies were introduced in 2015 not by state actors, but by community forest organisations, as part of efforts to protect areas under community management from a series of external threats. Specifically, a ‘monitoring network’, established by the second-tier community forest organisation ACOFOP [Asociación de Comunidades Forestales de Petén], uses drones to collect data in the form of photographs, video footage, and biomass measurements, stitched together to create maps and graphics that tell stories about forest change and protection. Continuing its accompaniment of rural communities since supporting the acquisition of community forestry concessions in the MBR, ACOFOP sets the parameters for this work. ¹⁴

ACOFOP's use of GIS technologies in participatory monitoring began after 2001, when a consortium of actors including a US-based archaeology company made a proposal to convert part of the MBR into a park focused on preserving archaeological treasures via eco-tourism. The proposals, which presented community forest actors as inefficient and poor stewards, would have seen several of the forest concessions cancelled. In response, ACOFOP focused on producing empirical evidence to show that the communities had been managing the forest effectively for decades. For example, areas under community management were shown to have much lower incidence of forest fires. Through these strategies, in conjunction with broader alliance-building, in May 2005, the decree (129–2002) for the new eco-park was revoked. What began as an instance of countermapping for data justice has since been elaborated into longer-term strategies that use conservation drones for both community-led governance of forest areas, and territorial protection. Through initial exchanges with Indigenous organisations in Panama, ACOFOP began using drones in 2015, with training reaching its culmination in 2018, leading to the empowerment of local communities to use drones in the everyday management of forests, as well as regional advocacy. Although challenges persist (for example, some conflicts between those who are, and are not, members of the forest cooperatives) this case study suggests that, when digital ecologies are effectively grounded in the objectives of data justice, potentials for securitisation, stereotyping via visual capture, and the production of fear dynamics, can be reduced.

VIII Differential implications of using drones in biodiversity conservation

Our case studies illustrate examples of the use of drones as surveillance technologies variously as instruments of terror and control; as remote sensing tools outsourced to technical companies under conditions of neoliberalism; and as participatory instruments used to assert or maintain rights to land and livelihoods. Our analysis of these cases suggests that, drones cannot per se be considered drivers of green securitisation processes, fearmongering, stereotyping via visual capture, or counter-mapping. Yet drones do – by virtue of transforming the infrastructures of decision-making and their linkages – alter how data is collected, how data moves, whom data can be shared with, and to what ends data can be set. Secondly, through their material composition and the association of their design with war, drones can affect atmospheres and perceptions, whether or not this is intended.

For the authors of this article, drones, as a surveillance technology, must therefore be understood to hold an ambivalent potential in the transforming geographies of conservation, being fundamentally shaped by who is using them, and for what purpose. Where they are deployed by the state as an explicit tool for the surveillance of less powerful residents, as in India, the results are alarming from a human rights and environmental justice perspective. Where drone use is outsourced to private sector consultancies with specialist expertise, as in Borneo, the social effects on the ground may be less harmful, but the technology becomes inaccessible for those without the appropriate training, resources, and access to equipment. Where drones are used by rural communities, as in Guatemala, they can be a tool for countermapping and the securing of data justice – but the data can still be passed to other actors, or the vehicles themselves used to assert spatial privilege.

One thing that is clear within our analysis is that the use of drones as part of surveillance infrastructures is especially relevant in what we may call ‘state’ landscapes: productions of more-than-human ecologies in which conservation plays a primarily disciplinary or biopolitical role (Peluso and Vandergeest 2011). State forests are primarily administrative entities, which function to legitimise some visions and actors over others, while extending state powers to organise and regulate populations (Gabrys et al. 2022). This administrative organising is articulated with environmental scientific knowledge, especially forestry engineering, to calculate and measure the amount of forest and give it a monetizable value that again justifies the counterinsurgency advance to remove the armed groups in the area (Peluso 1991). These concepts are highly pertinent to the India case, where conservation is an explicit means of fearmongering as part of a broader form of disciplinary control. Similar models have been implemented in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Colombia. In Guatemala, on the other hand, drones are today primarily used by community forestry organisations for community-led governance and the protection of the concessions against military efforts to reassert state legitimacy in the forest (Devine 2018; Millner 2020). Yet, it is important to clarify that this finding reflects the three case studies in question and may not reflect all conservation contexts. For example, the new political administration in Colombia is using aeroplane flights and drones to provide an ‘overview’ that can inform efforts to rewrite national environmental policies.

Another vector of power is neoliberalism: initiatives like REDD + programmes actively participate in a form of incorporating forests (diagrammed in terms of their carbon storage capacities) into commodities within carbon markets, so ‘fall[ing] within the neoliberal trend of privatization and marketization of public goods […] as well as the expansion of the frontiers of commodification of nature’ (Aguilar-Støen 2017, 99). This is relevant to both the Borneo and Guatemala cases, where models for protected areas based on private property (e.g., ecotourism) and for evaluating biodiversity restoration (e.g., carbon credits) are on the rise. Far from ‘deciphering’ a landscape, the models involved in the mapping of forests in terms of natural capital or carbon ‘bring into being – literally perform – new kinds of nature and relationships between humans and nature’ (Gallagher 2022, 175). Always presenting partial data, yet proposing wholes, these virtual forms of mapping nevertheless have very material effects (ibid.). Yet, and distinctly from state surveillance infrastructures, neoliberal models for conservation primarily empowers transnational actors and capacities for profit accumulation. For example, a turn to ‘outsourcing’ drone operations in Borneo potentially enables those with capital and technical resources (NGOs, private contractors) to exert control over, and profit from, ‘democratic’ technologies and data – a dynamic hidden in the roles of apolitical technicians.

Here we might also want to think about the wider transformation of environmental governance more generally via Smart Earth technologies and Smart Forest technologies – environmental monitoring through remote sensing, advanced ICTs, etc. – that enact extractive, green capitalism, while presenting as neutral (Gabrys et al. 2022). What is significant about such digital ecologies is not only how they participate in rendering environments visible in terms of elements like carbon (and its productive potentials) to the exclusion of other relationships, but also how they render invisible the ways that people participate in making this data through observations, suggestions, and interpretations (Johnson, Strawhacker and Pulsifer 2022). Inevitably this means the values involved in selecting and processing data (as indeed, in programming AI machines) are kept out of view (ibid.).

However, while we agree on the need for critical attention to the ways drone technologies interplay with other socio-environmental dynamics, we emphasise drones as surveillance technologies rather than war technologies, noting their capacities for spatial contestation. Besides the disturbing potentials covered in our cases, drones have been shown to present new means to hold corporations accountable; to counter the narratives told about minorities, and to produce evidence of effective conservation by communities. As Chua et al. (2020, 53) write, in relation to the use of aerial surveys in orangutan research, ‘more detailed than satellite imagery and less restricted than on-the-ground views’, drone visualisations can, further, ‘produce a new visual context that brings local concerns and ways of seeing and conservation interests into the same productive space’, generating local enthusiasm for conservation in the process. Yet, we emphasise, this new visual context can only be considered emancipatory to the degree that they increase conditions for community control of data in the long-term, and that the data are not shared with actors involved in policing or exploiting these communities. Meanwhile, although drones do not escape political issues encountered with formal mapping – they may still accept state administrative units; be used by other actors for land-grabbing; and exacerbate digital exclusion (Shrestha and Lapeyre 2018) – they are generally cheaper than alternative forms of participatory mapping (e.g., satellite imagery-based GIS), and may still stand to widen citizen science platforms of participation.

Yet with widening potentials for data justice using drones, questions of ‘what counts as data, what data are collected, and whose interests do they serve’ (Walker et al. 2022, 197) must also be considered. For environmentally just outcomes, meaningful participation by local communities (or those invested in the forest concerned, who may not be local) is essential, with attention to intra-community dynamics (Mena 2020). A clear principle also emerges here in terms of using drones responsibly: ownership and control of the data should be maintained by the people it is about (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2017). Breen et al. (2015) summarise key principles for using drones in these terms: only collect data if it's necessary; obtain permission through participatory means; avoid collecting data surreptitiously, and store data contextually (see also Jackman et al. 2023; Sandbrook et al. 2021). These principles can be set in the context of understandings drawn from STS scholarship that data must always be understood as social, it never ‘stands alone’ – meaning that it can also be refunctionalised beyond intended uses (Chandler 2016). To enact feminist and decolonial imperatives it is essential that drones are ‘wrenched’ from these contexts and animated differently, for ends of solidarity and repair (ibid.)

IX Conclusion

In this paper, we have explored the social and political implications of using drones in biodiversity conservation, with an emphasis on dimensions of technology, visuality and surveillance. Reviewing existing literatures in and around environmental geography helps us consider how new digital ecologies are transforming decision-making within and about protected areas, changing power relations and which actors are involved. In the literature and within our cases we have shown how drones can act within state forests to discipline and control subjects, contributing toward securitisation processes or even functioning as a technology of fear. Additionally, we have demonstrated how visual technologies may reinforce always-already embedded stereotypes, pointing to the need to interrogate accidental effects of using drones in conservation, and to implement fuller ethical guidelines. Thirdly, we have seen how such technologies may coarticulate with other powerful agendas, such as neoliberal imperatives in conservation, compounding vectors of accumulation and dispossession (Massé and Lunstrum 2016). Yet, finally, we have pointed to drones as technologies that can and are being used to define and enact data justice. Drones can help tell other stories about environments, partly because their data are visually compelling and can give a ‘close in’ view of forests and other conservation landscapes. They tend to be less expensive and easier to use than other technologies used in counter-mapping and can also be used to evidence incidence of illegal mining or incursions on Indigenous lands.

Drone technologies are consequently inherently ambiguous as surveillance technologies in conservation. They have political potential to support territorial defence and participatory processes by and for rural communities, as well as being weapons of control that can be used by state and private actors. For this reason, the introduction of drones into conservation spaces should not be regarded as an automatic move towards systems of green securitisation or state control – especially given the contemporary civilian history of conservation drones – yet conservation practitioners and researchers should not forget these potentials and must be cognisant of the demonstrable negative impacts that drones and drone-derived data can bring for local populations. On this point, more work is urgently needed to develop ethical protocols for drone use in conservation, even where there is inconsistent national and/or international regulation. Work has begun in this area (see e.g., Jackman et al. 2023; Sandbrook et al. 2021; Sharma et al. 2020; Young et al. 2022). There is a greater need to focus on how drones are used in research; on how to protect against the use of drone data from co-option; on the rights of communities and best-practice protocols for using drones in rural areas; and on how to avoid the incorporation of community drones into processes of green securitisation. While there is nothing innocent about drones, they can be repurposed to change the balance of power in conservation areas and goals toward ends of addressing injustice, and widening social participation.