Application of Machine Learning Tools for Waterbird Colony Monitoring Provides Gains in Precision and Temporal Efficiency
Waterbirds serve as important indicators of both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem health, making effective monitoring essential for tracking population health and identifying potential causes of decline. Drones have provided opportunities to overcome historic waterbird monitoring challenges, but the expertise and time required for manual image analysis creates a major bottleneck. Recent advances in deep learning-based object detection have enabled rapid, automatic detection of features in complex ecological imagery, though applications have largely been limited to single-species colonies, and practitioners lack quantitative comparisons of annotation time and accuracy across different levels of automation. We systematically compared four waterbird monitoring approaches using identical survey areas from Chester Island, a mixed-species colony in Matagorda Bay, Texas, in 2025: (1) traditional ground-based counts, (2) manual drone imagery-based counts, (3) computer-assisted counts using pre-annotations from an object detector with manual human verification (Human+ML), and (4) fully automated counts using object detector annotations (ML-only). We trained a YOLOv10 object detection model on manually annotated imagery of Chester Island in 2021 and applied it to the 2025 imagery. Manual drone annotation detected 6,530 birds in 40.5 hr and served as the primary reference standard. Human+ML detected 5,826 birds (89% of manual) in 7.7 hr, an 81% reduction in annotation time. ML-only detected 5,679 birds (87% of manual) in approximately 46 min, a 98% reduction. Ground counts recorded 5,868 birds (90% of manual). Detection generalized well across species while classification depended heavily on training data and morphological distinctiveness. The Human+ML workflow emerged as a practical middle ground, providing practitioners with empirical data to evaluate partial versus full automation strategies based on monitoring objectives. LAY SUMMARYO_LIConservation programs need accurate counts of nesting waterbirds, but analyzing drone images by hand has become a major bottleneck, slowing the availability of monitoring data for use. C_LIO_LIWe compared four ways to count waterbirds at a large nesting colony in coastal Texas where many species nest together: traditional ground-based counts, manual annotation of drone imagery, computer-assisted annotation, and fully automated annotation using a trained object detection model. C_LIO_LIDetection generalized well across species while classification depended on training data availability and morphological distinctiveness. C_LIO_LIPairing automated detection with site-specific or human classification offers a practical path forward for monitoring mixed-species colonies. C_LI