“I study the marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus), a species indigenous to the Galápagos Islands, a province of Ecuador in the eastern Pacific.
Iguanas are stoic, placid and funny creatures. My PhD project focused on understanding the differences between the various species present in the Galápagos. Initially, I thought I would just sit in the laboratory extracting DNA from samples sent by collaborators in Ecuador. One of my early frustrations was a lack of realistic population-size estimates for the Galápagos species, which are scattered across inaccessible parts of the archipelago.
At the end of my PhD in 2015, a colleague suggested I look into drone technologies to survey remote locations. And that small idea grew into a project called Iguanas from Above. After securing funding in 2020 from Leipzig University in Germany and the Galapagos Conservation Trust, a UK charity, I returned to the archipelago to test the feasibility of the approach. Now, just a few years later, my team and I have surveyed the whole archipelago, helped by more than 17,000 online volunteers.
