‘Fitbit For Whales’ and Other Tagging Tech Help Reshape Wildlife Conservation
August 19th, 2022
Via Mongabay, a look at how a ‘Fitbit for whales’ and other tagging tech are helping to reshape wildlife conservation:
When Alexandra Ross started her study on bridled nail-tail wallabies in central Queensland in Australia in 2017, the wildlife ecologist had a pressing concern. The species was already categorized as endangered by the Australian government, and a previous study had shown that these pint-sized kangaroo cousins (Onychogalea fraenata) panicked when they were fitted with heavy radio collars. Even worse, the collars sometimes got hooked onto a tree or a fence, choking the animal to death.
“Losing even one would be really bad,” Ross tells Mongabay in a video interview. “So we had to figure out a way to let them not get choked.”
With a lean budget making the purchase of expensive collars difficult, Ross went on to make a DIY collar. She attached a radio transmitter to an elastic cat collar with the help of small cables and super glue. The easily available cat collars were light and designed for long-term use. Their elastic nature made them easier for the wallabies to wriggle out of without choking. The results from her study, published in the journal Australian Mammalogy in 2021, showed that 25 out of the 39 collars she attached to wallabies remained in place for more than four months. Two wallabies were found to be agitated, but the study determined that other factors, including pouching of young ones, also played a role in causing that stress.
Ross says her collar could be replicated for any species with a neck. The goal, she says, is to reduce stress and injuries to animals during research or conservation activities. “Everything we do as scientists is intrusive,” she says. “But we are trying to be as minimally intrusive as possible with the end goal of helping them.”
Ross’s relatively cheap and ingenious collar is part of an ever-evolving generation of tagging and tracking devices used to study and protect wildlife. While her design might lie at the rough end of the spectrum, more advanced innovations are also being increasingly developed and deployed at the more refined end. The use of widely available consumer technology in many of them means they can potentially be scaled up and adapted for use across many different species of animals.
Estimating the impact on animals from the tagging techniques used to keep track of them is a tough task because there aren’t extensive studies on the subject. A 2011 study published in the journal Wildlife Research found that there is a “preponderance of studies focused on short-term effects, such as injuries and behavioral changes,” that tagging and marking techniques have on animals—including pain, impact on maternal attendance, and duration of foraging trips. While the techniques were not found to affect survival, the study found that “no published research has addressed other possible long-term effects.”
Despite the lack of research, conservation scientists and experts advocate the need to keep adopting newer methodologies and technologies to reduce any impact their work might have on animals. Biologist L. David Mech has been studying wolves (Canis lupus) in North America since 1958 and has seen firsthand how the development of new technology has reshaped the study and conservation of wildlife.
“When the first radio [transmitter] was put on animals in the 1960s, it was totally revolutionary and changed wildlife research tremendously by orders of magnitude,” he tells Mongabay in a video call.
Early on in his career, Mech says, it was impossible to locate a specific wolf. But that changed in November 1968 when he took a flight to track the first wolf he had fitted with a radio collar. “Suddenly, I merely listened to a ‘beep beep beep’ radio signal, and lo and behold, down below was the wolf I had collared,” he says. “It was a virtual miracle in research terms.”
With the advent of more cutting-edge technology in recent years, Mech says there’s a perpetual need to keep updating the methods used in conservation to minimize the trauma they might cause to animals.
“There are still a great deal of things we don’t know about many species, and that will require even newer types of technology,” he says.
Progress is well underway. Much like how technology that was developed for human use—like radio transmission and GPS—has proved useful for research, tracking, and conservation in the past, newer consumer technology innovations are also trickling down into the study of wildlife.
Marine conservationist David Haas calls the product he developed “Fitbit for whales.” Haas developed the FaunaTag with engineer and collaborator Sam Kelly as part of his Ph.D. work, which studied how dolphins respond physiologically when they dive into the depths of the ocean. The multisensor device measures movement, acoustics, depth of travel, along with physiological factors such as heart rate, cardiac energetics, and blood oxygen level. Tags for dolphins and whales are typically dart-like, embedded in the animal’s fin or its body. But for the FaunaTag, Haas uses a suction cup to ensure that the device is as minimally intrusive as possible. “We wanted to develop noninvasive tag technology that could add to the suite of existing sensor devices, but one that could also give us some idea of what was going on with the animal’s physiology,” he tells Mongabay in a video interview.
Despite possibly being one of the very few noninvasive devices that measure multiple parameters, adapting the technology used in consumer wearables like the Apple Watch and Fitbit wasn’t an easy feat. “It’s really easy to use light to measure physiology in humans, but it’s incredibly challenging to solve that problem in dolphins and whales,” Haas says. “You are already talking about one of the hardest animals to collect physiological data on, because of their incredibly thick skin, thick blubber layers, and blood vessels.”
The parameters measured by the FaunaTag in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops spp.) were found to be consistent with measurements made in previous studies using more invasive tags. Haas and his partner are now developing a new version of the product meant for terrestrial animals. They also continue to do more clinical validation for the products, as they await the start of manufacturing and market launch, both currently stalled by the ongoing global supply chain crisis.
While he says he’s excited at the prospect of adapting consumer technology for use in the study and conservation of wildlife, Haas also warns about the challenges that come with it. Among the many hurdles, such devices need to be built to withstand harsh wild environments—a far cry from what consumer wearables are normally subjected to. Additionally, absence of WiFi or cellular network coverage in the wild poses communication issues that aren’t usually a concern in human physiological tracking devices, at least not for a prolonged period of time.
“We spent the last four years running up against the challenges of applying human medical sensor technology to animals,” Haas says. “People should and will try it, but the challenges are non-trivial.”
,
Read More »Earning Its Stripes: Tech Used To Crack Tiger Trade
August 18th, 2022
Via Terra Daily, an article on the use of artificial intelligence to help stop poaching:
In a town in northeastern Scotland, Debbie Banks looks for clues to track down criminals as she clicks through a database of tiger skins.
There are thousands of photographs, including of rugs, carcasses and taxidermy specimens.
Banks, the crime campaign leader for the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a London-based charity, tries to identify individual big cats from their stripes.
Once a tiger is identified, an investigator can pinpoint where it comes from.
“A tiger’s stripes are as unique as human fingerprints,” Banks told AFP.
“We can use the images to cross-reference against images of captive tigers that might have been farmed.”
Currently this is slow painstaking work.
But a new artificial intelligence tool, being developed by The Alan Turing Institute, a centre in the UK for data science and artificial intelligence, should make life much easier for Banks and law enforcement officials.
The project aims to develop and test AI technology that can analyse the tigers’ stripes in order to identify them.
“We have a database of images of tigers that have been offered for sale or have been seized,” Banks said.
“When our investigators get new images, we need to scan those against the database.
“At the moment we are doing that manually, looking at the individual stripe patterns of each new image that we get and cross-referencing it against the ones we have in our database.”
It is hoped that the new technology will help law enforcement agencies determine where tiger skins come from and allow them to investigate the transnational networks involved in trafficking tigers.
Once the officials know the origins of confiscated tiger skins and products, they will be able to tell whether the animal was farmed or poached from a protected area.
Poaching, fuelled by consumer demand, remains a major threat to the survival of the species, according to the EIA.
Tiger skins and body parts are sought after, partly due to their use in traditional Chinese medicine.
An estimated 4,500 tigers remain in the wild across Asia.
“Tigers faced a massive population decline in the last 120 years, so we want to do everything we can to help end the trade in their parts and products, including tiger skins,” Banks said.
Anyone with photographs of tigers is invited to submit them to the EIA to help bolster the AI database.
“We are inviting individuals — whether they are photographers or researchers and academics — who may have images of tigers where their stripe patterns are clear,” Banks said.
“They could be live tigers, dead tigers or tiger parts.
“If they can share those with us, the data scientists can then develop, train and test the algorithm,” she said.
“We need thousands of images just to do that phase of the project.”
,
Read More »Space Tech Helping To Tackle Deforestation
August 2nd, 2022
Via BBC, an article on how space tech helping to tackle deforestation:
Conservationist, Leonidas Nzigiyimpa says “you can’t manage what you don’t know”.
He adds: “In order to improve the situation of forests, we need to use new technology.”
Mr Nzigiyimpa is the chief warden of five protected forestry areas in the small central African country of Burundi.
For the past two decades, he and his team have been working with local communities to protect and manage the forest. His face lights up when he describes the fresh smell and beauty of the areas. “It’s pure nature,” he says.
In carrying out his work, Mr Nzigiyimpa has to consider a range of factors, from monitoring the impact of human actions and economies, to tracking biodiversity and the impact of climate change, plus staff numbers and budgets.
To help him track and record all of this, he now uses the latest version of a free piece of software called the Integrated Management Effectiveness Tool.
The tool was developed specifically for such environmental work by a project called Biopama (Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management Programme). This is supported by both the European Union and the 79 member state Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.
“So, we use this kind of tool to train the managers of the site to use it to collect good data, and to analyse this data, in order to take good decisions,” says Mr Nzigiyimpa.
Tracking and protecting the world’s forests is not just important for the local communities and economies most directly affected. Deforestation contributes to climate change so restoring forests could help combat it.
Some 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of the world’s forests are lost every year, according to the United Nations.
This deforestation accounts for 20% of all the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to the World Wildlife Fund, which adds that “by reducing forest loss, we can reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change”.
To try to restore forests and other natural habitats around the world, the United Nations last year launched the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. This has seen countries, companies and other organisations promise action towards preventing, halting and reversing the degradation of ecosystems worldwide.
“But just saying that we’re going to restore, it’s not enough,” says Yelena Finegold, forestry officer at the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. “There’s the need for responsible planning of how that ecosystem restoration is going to happen, followed by actions on the ground enabled by investments in restoration, and monitoring systems in place to track that ecosystem restoration.”
This increased focus on managing forests has given rise to new digital tools to gather, sort and use data better.
One of these is the FAO’s own Framework for Ecosystem Monitoring (Ferm) website. The site was launched last year, and uses satellite imagery to highlight changes to forests around the world. The maps and data are accessible to any internet users, be they a scientist, government official, business, or member of the public.
A key data source for Ferm is US space agency Nasa, and its Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation system. Known as Gedi for short, this acronym is pronounced like the word Jedi from the Star Wars films. And continuing the theme of that movie series, its tagline is “may the forest be with you”.
The tech itself is certainly very sci-fi turned real life. “We shoot laser beams at trees from the International Space Station,” says Laura Duncanson, who helps to lead the Gedi project from the Univesrity of Marylands’s Department of Geographical Sciences.
“We use the use the reflected energy to map forests in 3D, including their height, canopy density, and carbon content,” adds Dr Duncanson, who is a leading expert in remote sensing. “This is an exciting new technology because for decades we have been able to observe deforestation from space, but now with Gedi we can assign the carbon emissions associated with forest loss [for greater accuracy].”
Maps and data are also provided to Ferm by Norwegian business Planet Labs, which operates more than 200 camera-equipped satellites. These take some 350 million photos of Earth’s surface on a daily basis, each covering an area of one sq km.
Planet Labs can also be directly hired by governments and businesses around the world. In addition to monitoring forests, its cameras can be used to check everything from droughts to agriculture, energy and infrastructure projects, and monitoring key infrastructure, such as ports.
Remi D’Annunzio, a fellow FAO forestry officer, says that all the available imagery from space “has tremendously changed the way we monitor forests, because it has produced extremely repeatable observations and extremely frequent revisits of places”.
He adds: “Basically, now, with all these publicly available satellites combined, we can get a full snapshot of the Earth every four to five days.”
Examples of how all this near real-time monitoring via Ferm is now being used are pilot schemes in Vietnam and Laos that are trying to tackle illegal logging. Rangers and community workers on the ground are sent alerts to their mobile phones when new deforestation is spotted.
“Now, what we’re really trying to do is not just understand the volume of forests being lost, but where is it specifically being lost in this district or that, so that we can monitor loss, and even prevent it in near real-time, from getting worse,” says FAO forestry officer, Akiko Inoguchi.
,
Read More »