How Africa’s Largest IoT Conservation Network Supports Wildlife Protection
June 28th, 2023
Via Fast Company, a look at how an IoT conservation network supports wildlife protection in Kenya by leveraging cloud-based sensors and networks to collect, monitor, and analyze environmental data in real time:
Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) and Connected Conservation Foundation are protecting the most vulnerable animals and natural resources in Kenya with Africa’s largest landscape-wide Internet of Things conservation network.
The project aims to enhance wildlife and natural resource conservation by leveraging cloud-based sensors and networks to collect, monitor, and analyze environmental data in real time.
This massive undertaking will contribute critical digital infrastructure to help Kenyan partners measure and achieve the global biodiversity targets set out at COP 15, the 2022 UN biodiversity conference, to conserve and manage at least 30% of the world’s natural habitats by 2030.
The data combined with analytics and conservation tools are geared toward effectively protecting and managing wildlife, ensuring peace, and improving the livelihood of the people of northern Kenya, says Samuel Lekimaroro, wildlife protection manager at Northern Rangelands Trust, a Kenyan conservation organization that works to protect and restore the Northern Rangelands of Kenya.
NRT’S IOT CONSERVATION NETWORK: THE FIRST IN KENYA
The NRT’s Internet of Things (IoT) conservation network, the first of its kind in Kenya, is made possible by the Connected Conservation Foundation, which has brought together a coalition of private- and public-sector partners including Cisco, Actility, 51 Degrees, and EarthRanger.The IoT network and high-bandwidth communication backbone currently covers about 7.4 million acres of wilderness in Kenya—a figure that includes 22 of NRT’s community-led conservancies and 4 private reserves with plans to bring more on board to include more of the region, says Sophie Maxwell, executive director of the Connected Conservation Foundation. More than 190 new sensors have been deployed to all parks, with more scheduled in the next few weeks, bringing the total to 250.
For this project, the LoRaWAN network management is done using Actility’s ThingPark platform. While Actility is on the network side, Cisco builds the LoRaWAN gateways or base stations and Actility manages the base stations and the end devices to collect the data and provide the data to application servers.
“What we provide is the core network that connects the base station and the end devices,” says Alper Yegin, chief technology officer at Actility, a provider of low-power networks that play a vital role in IoT infrastructure. “Then on the technical side, there are also sensors coming from various device makers as well as NRT and Connected Conservation.”
NRT and Connected Conservation manage the parks and identify what the use cases are and then they bring all the technologies together. As such, NRT and the Connected Conservation Foundation are the users of this deployment and Cisco is the technology provider, according to Yegin. “We’re providing an innovative solution to manage gateways, integrate sensors, and monitor network operations in real time,” he says.
REVOLUTIONIZING CONSERVATION PROGRAMS
The capabilities of this IoT technology are revolutionizing the way conservation programs operate, offering long-lasting, cost-effective, and secure sensors to combat poaching and protect endangered species, Yegin says.The LoRaWAN IoT sensors are perfect for deploying in the wildlife parks, tracking animals, tracking equipment and vehicles, tracking weather conditions as well as for monitoring the working conditions of machinery, Yegin says. And since the sensors have very low power consumption, once they’re placed on the animals, they can last for nearly 10 years, sometimes more, he says.
“The other special thing with this technology is that it uses unlicensed band, meaning one does not have to acquire a very expensive and limited license from the government,” Yegin says. “So it’s pretty much like Wi-Fi today—anyone can put up Wi-Fi and the same is true for LoRaWAN. As such, this also drives the cost down, which is essential in such wide-area deployments.”
Wildlife protection is a perfect use case for LPWAN IoT, given the vast territories to monitor, the necessity for long-lasting, low-cost sensors, and the requirement for secure technology to combat poaching, he says.
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The various sensors, which include rhino, lion, cheetah, and leopard trackers, livestock trackers, and ranger and vehicle trackers, provide critical data that is then visualized in EarthRanger for analysis and insights so that NRT can take any necessary conservation actions. EarthRanger is a tool that collects, integrates, and displays all historical and real-time data available from a protected area to enable organizations to make better decisions about how to manage those areas.For example, data from the ranger, vehicle, and wildlife sensors enable rangers to monitor and respond to rhino threats to prevent poaching, share information on sick or vulnerable animals, boost conservation management strategies, and redeploy security measures between conservancies.
INCREASE IN ENDANGERED BLACK RHINO POPULATION
Black rhinos are still critically endangered animals because of the demand for rhino horns on the international black market. Kenya, however, is one of the few places in the world where black rhino populations are increasing due to the success of these conservation efforts, Maxwell says.Consequently, it’s crucial to establish safe and connected rangelands for these endangered species to roam, according to Maxwell.
Having the tags on the rhinos enables the NRT to remove the fences and create larger connected habitats for the rhinos to roam, she says. And it has helped boost the black rhino numbers in Kenya by 10%.
“The technology is what we call a reserve-area network solution—and that is connectivity, communications, and sensors that bring real-time data back into an operations room,” she says. “That data is then visualized on the map through a range of software and that enables people to track the movement of people, the movement of wildlife, and the movement of the ranger teams. And that all happens in real time.”
The battery-powered LoRaWAN-enabled sensors communicate via a long-range, ultra-low data rate connection, resulting in longer battery life. Additionally, LoRa sensors are a fraction of the cost of satellite tracking tags—transforming how conservation programs operate because being able to deploy many sensors means capturing more data, enabling NRT to demonstrate the effectiveness of its conservation efforts, which is really valuable, according to Maxwell.
“Previously, NRT and our member conservancies used an analog system, and we were unable to observe what was happening in the landscape in terms of wildlife trends, asset monitoring, and security patrol coordination,” Lekimaroro says. “We were only communicating via radio between the conservancies and the Joint Operations and Communications Center (JOCC).”
Through Connected Conservation, NRT is now able to successfully protect and monitor wildlife, coordinate field patrols, and support the government and communities in peace efforts from an informed point of knowledge/data assessed by EarthRanger, according to Lekimaroro.
“All field patrol teams can be monitored and supported by the team in headquarters, which is the central location, from the JOCC,” he says. “Through technology, intra- and inter-conservancy communications have improved, allowing for more efficient surveillance, wildlife protection, and monitoring operations.”
The increased data transmission into the centralized JOCC system has helped the NRT assess patrol efforts, wildlife trends, patterns, and data generation for management decision making, Lekimaroro says.
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Read More »June 24th, 2023
In part due to illegal fishing, more than one third of the world’s fishery stocks have fallen below biologically sustainable levels, threatening the more than 3 billion people who depend on seafood for animal protein and further imperiling maritime ecosystems already stressed by elevated levels of carbon dioxide.
It’s rampant.
Seafood is one of the last animal proteins that people hunt in large quantities. Although farmed seafood has grown to more than half of global consumption, more than one hundred million tons are caught in the wild every year. By one estimate, illegal and unreported fishing accounts for one-fifth of that total.
It’s on your store shelves.
As much as 11 percent of U.S. seafood imports came from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
A stark reality confronts anyone who seeks to rein in bad behavior on the ocean: it is very, very big. To pinpoint where in the haystack to search for needles, a team of data scientists and machine learning engineers called Global Fishing Watch collects data from fishing boats’ Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders, whose signals are picked up by satellites and land-based receivers.
Recently, the team at Global Fishing Watch had a novel idea: instead of looking for where fishing boats broadcast their positions, what if they looked for where they hid them? “The AIS data tells us a lot, but the absence of it does as well,” Tyler Clavelle, a data scientist at Global Fishing Watch, told me.
Together with scientists from the University of California at Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries, Global Fishing Watch analyzed more than 28 billion AIS signals from 2017 to 2019. The researchers identified more than 55,000 gaps in the data and discovered that disabled transponders hide about 6 percent of the globe’s commercial fishing activity.
Gaps in transponder data, 2017-2019
Fewer
More
EUROPE
U.S vessels
go dark in the
Bering Sea
to hide from
competitors.
ASIA
NORTH AMERICA
Chinese-flagged
boats often don’t
report catch in the
Northwest Pacific.
Africa’s west
coast is a hotspot
for piracy and
illegal fishing.
AFRICA
SOUTH AMERICA
Illegal fishing has
been reported near
the Galapagos and
off Peru.
AUSTRALIA
The boundary along
Argentina’s Exclusive
Economic Zone showed
the highest volume of
data gaps.
Fishing boats often hide their signals on the edge of Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundaries, where countries have the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles off their shoreline. That’s just what the Oyang 77 did in early 2019 when it vanished and reappeared near the boundary of Argentina’s EEZ.
The South Korean-flagged trawler belonged to the fleet operated by the Sajo Oyang corporation, notorious for its record of high seas transgressions, as documented by The Guardian. In recent years, the Oyang 77 had gotten in trouble in New Zealand for illegally dumping dead fish overboard, underreporting catch and failing to pay workers, according to a report from Oceana, a nonprofit focused on ocean conservancy.
In February 2019, the Argentine Coast Guard discovered the trawler with its nets extended inside the EEZ. They found more than 310,000 pounds of seafood on board. Leaving nothing to chance, they deployed a helicopter and an airplane to assist the Coast Guard in escorting the Oyang 77 to shore, releasing it after confiscating its fishing equipment and extracting a fine of 25 million Argentine pesos, or about $550,000.
Sajo Oyang did not respond to multiple requests to comment.
Global Fishing Watch’s data did not help catch the Oyang 77, but patrol boats from the U.S. Coast Guard and Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans already make use of it to decide which boats to pursue. Countries inspecting fishing boats in port can use Global Fishing Watch’s analytical tools to narrow their search.
“You can look up a vessel and see a history of its activity and quickly filter out vessels that appear to be operating above board, or identify vessels that have big gaps in their data or are operating in ways that are suspicious,” Clavelle said.
Using ships’ AIS data to enforce illegal fishing laws is not as easy as it sounds. AIS is not universally mandated aboard commercial fishing boats. Many fleets, including U.S. fishing boats, are tracked with a separate technology called the Vessel Monitoring System, which is visible to authorities but hidden from other vessels.
AIS was created in the 1990s as a way to keep oil tankers from crashing. In the 2000s, private companies began launching satellites that could capture AIS signals from space, and a new industry emerged to supply government agencies with ships’ location data. Yet even law-abiding fisherman sometimes wish to hide their location, either to conceal good fishing spots from competitors or to avoid capture in waters where pirates lurk.
“We thought we might have a pure illegal fishing story,” said Heather Welch, a NOAA affiliate and marine biologist at UC Santa Cruz, who led the research with Global Fishing Watch. “And it became very clear that that’s not fair to the fishermen, that that’s not the story we’re seeing here.”
The researchers used a method of machine learning to separate the innocent AIS disabling from the nefarious. For instance, behavior that could have looked like statistical noise appeared to the researchers’ computer program as “loitering,” when boats with disabled transponders were motionless long enough to offload their catch to giant floating refrigerators called reefers.
This is not always illegal, but it can be a way for boats with illegal catch to get rid of the evidence. “It’s a way to launder illegally caught seafood into the supply chain,” Welch told me. That makes it harder to know whether the fish at the grocery store was caught legally or not. The analysis could help coast guards pinpoint where and when illegal transshipment is likely to take place.
Some in the fishing industry say that the rise of farmed seafood will reduce the opportunities for illegal fishing. The share of seafood from aquaculture grew from 6 percent in 1960 to 58 percent today, according to figures from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
That share is likely to keep rising, said Gavin Gibbons, vice president of communications at the National Fisheries Institute, an industry lobby. “There’s only going to be more farmed going forward. Period. End of story,” Gibbons told me. “Farming will have to increase in order to feed a growing planet.”
Yet aquaculture has only kept pace with the growth in seafood consumption and has not replaced wild caught seafood. Since the 1990s, wild seafood catch has stayed steady at about 100 million tons per year.
In short, fish farming has not lowered the pressure on wild marine life. Even if aquaculture continues to grow, there will always be demand for wild caught fish, which many people prefer to the farmed variety.
If aquaculture is not the solution to overfishing on the high seas, perhaps technology is. Global Fishing Watch and allies like Oceana, which co-founded the project in 2015, have pushed to require AIS on more commercial fishing boats. Global Fishing Watch’s next goal is to learn to detect fishing boats directly from satellite imagery, which would reveal far more activity than AIS signals alone.
“What gets monitored gets managed,” Clavelle told me. “So if you can’t see what’s happening on the ocean, how do you expect to manage it properly?” ,
Read More »Oceans To Get Better Protection With Connected Underwater Technology
June 15th, 2023
Via the EU’s Horizon Innovation Magazine, a look at how – amid rising sea levels, plastics pollution and overfishing – the emerging Internet of Underwater Things will vastly expand knowledge about the world’s seas.
Imagine seals swimming in the sea with electronic tags that send real-time water data to scientists back in their laboratories. Or archaeologists near a coast being automatically alerted when a diver trespasses on a precious shipwreck.
Such scenarios are becoming possible as a result of underwater connected technologies, which can help monitor and protect the world’s oceans. They can also shed light on the many remaining mysteries of the sea.
New frontier
‘A lot of funding has been provided to companies and institutions exploring space, but we have oceans around us that we have not explored,’ said Vladimir Djapic, innovation associate at the EU-funded TEUTA project.
Around 70% of the Earth is covered by oceans and more than four-fifths of them have never been mapped, explored or even seen by humans.
The Internet of Underwater Things, or IoUT, is a network of smart, interconnected sensors and devices to make communicating in the sea easier. It contrasts with the Internet of Things, or IoT, covering everything from smart phones to devices that allow people to switch on home heating remotely,
TEUTA ran from October 2020 through March 2022. It helped a Croatian company, H20 Robotics, develop and sell lightweight low-cost acoustic devices and robotic platforms for underwater wireless networks.
‘With a limited number of underwater network installations before, we could only explore limited coastal areas,’ said Djapic, who is chief executive officer of Zagreb-based H20 Robotics.
Advances in underwater technologies are expected to transform many sectors including marine biology, environmental monitoring, construction and geology.
Whale-like ways
TEUTA developed acoustic technology, which mimics the way whales and dolphins communicate.
Acoustic waves, unlike radio or optical communication ones, travel long distances underwater regardless of whether it is murky or clear.
Remote sensors, measuring tools, detection systems or cameras set up at an underwater site gather data then sent to a buoy on the surface. The buoy in turn sends the information wirelessly back to base, via the cloud, without the need for communication cables.
One focus area is improving communications between divers and land-based colleagues, according to Djapic.
‘For example, a diver working in underwater construction can send a message to a supervisor and request additional help or tools or similar,’ said Djapic.
Improved underwater communications will help connect land and sea, © H2O ROBOTICS, 2023Improved underwater communications will help connect land and sea, © H2O ROBOTICS, 2023
Scientists also stand to benefit by, for example, being able to remotely turn on a water-quality measuring device installed on the seabed from their labs.
For their part, archaeologists could use the technology to help protect vulnerable underwater sites with intruder-detection technology installed in remote locations.
Indeed, TEUTA technology will support another EU-backed project, TECTONIC, seeking to improve the documentation and protection of underwater cultural heritage at three pilot sites.
The sites are the Capo Rizzuto Marine Protected Area in southern Italy, the submerged ancient harbour of Aegina in Greece’s Saronic Gulf and a shipwreck site in the Deseado estuary in Argentina.
Other possibilities such as underwater agriculture or mining could also open up, according to Djapic.
For public agencies or non-governmental organisations that monitor water quality, the technology could replace the need for researchers to go and collect samples physically and deliver them to the lab.
While TEUTA gave a boost to fledgling underwater communication technologies, more work needs to be done in marketing them and ensuring they are used more widely, according to Djapic.
‘It all needs to be analysed,’ he said. ‘Our technology enables the measuring of environmental parameters.’
Sensors and samplers
Meanwhile, in Italy, a team of researchers is pursuing a new approach to ocean-data collection by using sensors and samplers that could be integrated into existing observatories and platforms.
This would enable the gathering of vast amounts of information useful for, as an example, the proposed European Digital Twin of the Ocean announced in February 2022. The twin will be a real-time digital replica of the ocean integrating both historical and live data.
By developing a new generation of marine technologies, the EU-funded NAUTILOS project will gather previously inaccessible information and improve understanding of physical, chemical and biological changes in oceans.
Running for four years through September 2024, the project is coordinated by Gabriele Pieri of the Rome-based National Research Council.
‘Our proposal set out to fill a gap in the observation of oceans,’ said Pieri. ‘They are the largest habitats on Earth, but the least observed ones because of the difficulties in on-site observation and the costs of monitoring.’
NAUTILOS technology is already being tested in the Baltic and the Mediterranean seas, including the Aegean and Adriatic.
Sensors can, for example, measure levels of chlorophyll-A and dissolved oxygen in the water. These are important indicators of water quality and, by extension, of the presence of fish, helping protect their stocks.
Sensors and samplers collecting information about the concentration of microplastics in the water also expand understanding of the impact of human-generated pollution on the oceans.
Helping flippers and hands
One of the NAUTILOS partners, France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), has even recruited some unlikely teammates: seals.
Swimming off the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, these sea creatures have been tagged with sensors that record valuable data about the animals themselves and their habitats.
The NAUTILOS team, made up of research institutions and companies, is developing more than a dozen types of sensors and samplers. These include remote sensing technologies and microplastics detectors.
The project is keen to demonstrate that the new tools can work with existing and future platforms and easily switch between them.
The tools are relatively cheap, can be deployed quickly and work in conjunction with other equipment, offering many advantages. For example, a sensor can be mounted on an autonomous underwater vehicle and then moved to a fixed buoy.
Citizen science is an important part of NAUTILOS, which works with volunteers organising campaigns around ocean plastics, for example, as well as with scuba-diving associations whose members can test new technologies and offer feedback.
The team has also developed a smartphone app for divers to upload photos of underwater flora or fauna that can be assessed by researchers.
‘The interest in citizen science has really surprised me,’ said Pieri. ‘A lot of people are willing to help improve the life of the sea.’
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