Drone photography for marine conservation: Joanna Steidle’s long-term survey
Joanna Steidle uses drone photography to create a multi-year visual record of East Coast marine migrations and absences to support conservation research.
Key facts
- Seven-year, repeat drone surveys along the US East Coast create a longitudinal visual archive.
- Primary focus on menhaden migrations to document presence, absence and interception by fisheries.
- Top-down UAV imagery captures whale lunge feeding and ray aggregations unobtainable from boats.
2 minute read
Joanna Steidle has turned an artistic drone practice into a methodical tool for marine conservation. Over seven years she has flown repeated aerial surveys along the US East Coast—from New England to Florida—building a longitudinal visual archive of baitfish, rays and whales. Her priority species is Atlantic menhaden, a keystone baitfish heavily targeted by commercial fleets; her images track when and where schools appear and, crucially, when they do not. Those absences are scientifically valuable but hard to document by traditional surveys. Steidle also records rising cownose ray numbers and captures humpback whale lunge-feeding from a vantage point boats cannot safely achieve.
The approach bridges art and applied science: gallery‑worthy images draw attention while the underlying metadata and repeated observations feed conservation conversations. For policymakers and marine managers, drone-derived time series can act as an independent visual complement to fisheries data, signalling local declines or shifts in predator–prey dynamics that merit further study. Steidle emphasizes methodological rigor—focused geography, repeated flights, and openness to unexpected findings—rather than one-off travel photography. If continued for another decade or more, her archive could become a high-resolution visual baseline documenting how coastal ecosystems respond to fishing pressure, warming waters and habitat change.
Source: The Drone Girl
