Abstract: Information on large-scale disaster areas, like the location of affected civilians, is highly valuable for disaster relief efforts. This information can be collected by an Aerial Monitoring System, using UAVs to detect smart mobile devices carried by civilians. State-of-the-art systems typically rely on a purely passive detection approach. In this paper, we present a cooperative communication system between UAVs and ground-based devices to improve the detection performance of such an Aerial Monitoring System. We provide different approaches for the cooperative information collection and evaluate them in a simulated inner-city scenario. The results highlight the effectiveness of the cooperative system, being able to detect civilian devices in the disaster area faster and more comprehensively than a non-cooperative approach.