Owing to the upsurge in the number of endangered species and understanding animal patterns in general as well as population demographics; the monitoring of wildlife species is an essential for the conservation and safety of animals. In order to organize and manage the reserves, the nature bequeaths to us, we need to have hands-on information of their population and food trends, conditions where they survive and other species in the ecosystem. The paper presents a vision-based approach to monitor wildlife using an aerial platform. A quad-rotor based aerial platform is used for the very first time for this purpose. Field imaging is done using a digital cellphone camera mounted on the platform to acquire video of horses in the field. Two techniques, Lucas-Kanade and Horn-Schunck methods are applied on the acquired set of images and the results are compared. Noise due to fluctuations and light conditions are minimized using Gaussian and HSV filters. Experiments show results with an absolute mean difference of 2.84 pixels and 8.50 pixels for changes in X and Y directions respectively for the two approaches.

Water resources planners and policymakers often ask questions about the future projections of drought characteristics (events, intensity, severity, duration, and peak) under different climatic scenarios. This study focused on quantifying the historical (1951-2005) and future (2026-2100) drought characteristics using the Standardized precipitation index (SPI) under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 climate scenarios for the Balochistan province of Pakistan, an arid and drought-vulnerable region. Precipitation data of MPI-ESM-LR_RCA4 RCM was obtained from the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment South Asia (CORDEX-SA). The CORDEX-SA data was interpolated at 12-gauge stations and bias-corrected by the distribution mapping method using Asian Precipitation - Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration towards Evaluation (APHRODITE) data. The drought characteristics were calculated based on standardized precipitation index (SPI), and intercompared between northern Balochistan (NB) and southern Balochistan (SB). It was found that the northern Balochistan (NB) region has suffered more droughts in the historical period and is also projected to have more severe and intense droughts than SB region. It was also found that with the increase of drought events, the duration reduces, which means that the higher the drought events at a station, the lower the drought duration. Government officials should focus more on managing the already few freshwater resources sustainably, given the increased likelihood of droughts in Balochistan due to climate change.