SORA 2.5-Guided BVLOS UAS for Wildlife Conservation in Kenya: Reducing Friction Between Safety and Field Operations

Highlights: What are the main findings? In conservation environments, ground risk is largely driven by transient populations (e.g., tourism and ranger activity), which are not reliably captured by standard population raster datasets. Formal safety requirements and field realities are often misaligned in wildlife operations, creating operational friction between prescribed procedures and practical execution. What are the implications of the main findings? Ground-risk assessments in conservancies should prioritise bottom-up, activity-based population estimates, using raster products primarily for triangulation and sensitivity analysis. Reducing friction between safety requirements and field needs, through iterative crew optimisation and mission-specific procedure design, can improve both operational efficiency and procedural compliance. Safe Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations are increasingly required for wildlife monitoring and conservation, yet existing regulatory frameworks are rarely tailored to protected areas characterised by low population density and limited infrastructure. This paper presents a field-based use case illustrating how the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) methodology can be applied to conservation-oriented BVLOS missions under Kenyan airspace conditions, including coordination within military-controlled airspace. We evaluate three population-density estimation approaches (qualitative, bottom-up, and top-down) against available ground truth, and compare tabulated and analytical SORA methods for deriving the Ground Risk Class. The work illustrates how SORA 2.5 structures ground and air risk reasoning in a conservation context, while retrospective review identifies limitations in containment, Operational Safety Objectives, and tactical mitigation performance requirements. Field trials involved five concurrent teams and 30 personnel conducting over 260 flights and more than 60 h of UAS activity across the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, providing insights into multi-team coordination under field conditions. Field implementation revealed areas of misalignment between prescribed safety requirements and operational realities, prompting iterative adaptation of workflows and procedures. Observed outcomes included reductions in team size (25–50%) and procedural steps (18%), derived from retrospective comparison of field procedures. A lightweight Uncrewed Traffic Management prototype was also trialled, revealing practical limitations in conservancy environments. Finally, we present a ten-step framework for developing field-ready safety procedures to support risk-informed decision-making in non-standard operational contexts. The findings provide empirically grounded guidance on applying SORA principles to conservation UAS missions, without proposing a new risk framework or generalised operational model.