Can Tech Stop Animal Poachers in Their Tracks?
July 15th, 2023
Via Slate, a look at how governments are using counterterrorism tactics and technology to hunt down poachers:
In August 2021, forest range officer Remya Raghavan caught three people carrying wild boar meat in the Wayanad forest of Kerala, a state in southern India. Possessing wild animal meat is a crime under the country’s 1972 Wildlife Protection Act, so Raghavan entered all the details of the crime—location, witnesses, names of the accused, items seized, and section of the forest—in a mobile application. Just like that, the case was officially registered in the app-based system, which signaled that it needed to be taken to court.
The app Raghavan used is called HAWK, or Hostile Activity Watch Kernel, and it appears to be the first such digital intelligence gathering system for wildlife crime in India. It helps officers like Raghavan centralize and share information on forest and wildlife crimes in real time. The app, and efforts like it, fills a huge need: Global demand for elephant ivory, rhino horns, pangolin scales, live reptiles, and big cats has fueled a poaching crisis across the world. Countries like Botswana, India, Kenya, and South Africa have reported high incidences of poaching, and globally, wildlife trafficking is considered the fourth-largest category of illegal trade, after arms, drugs, and human trafficking. In India, more than 70,000 native and exotic species were trafficked from 2011 to 2020. In South Africa, close to 10,000 rhinos have been poached in the past decade (though poaching incidences have decreased since 2015).
The illegal wildlife trade is a huge threat to the survival of species and endangers biodiversity, the environment, health, and livelihoods. According to the World Health Organization, illegal logging, fishing, and wildlife trade results in a global loss of $7 billion to $12 billion worth of government revenue per year. The loss of wildlife also exacerbates the climate crisis because wildlife helps maintain the forest ecosystem, which acts as a carbon sink. Further, wildlife trafficking could increase the likelihood of future zoonotic epidemics and pandemics.
Technology is key to tackle the illegal wildlife trade, and there are lots of different efforts in that direction—camera traps, drones, and DNA analysis have been used globally, and HAWK sits alongside several similar mobile apps designed to fight or prevent poaching. In East Africa, the U.S. Agency for International Development launched the Wildlife Information and Landscape Database, which uses GPS to record information on poaching, animal mortality, human-wildlife conflict, and illegal human activity. Similarly, in Kenya, the app-based Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool allows rangers to track threats to elephants, which officials say has led to a decline in poaching. Another app is targeted at the aviation industry, allowing airport and airline staff to report suspected trafficking. Even the state of Utah has an app for reporting poaching.
Although these apps have proven helpful in investigating and prosecuting cases, the larger challenge of finding the people funding and orchestrating these crimes, many of whom are part of international crime networks, remains.
HAWK was developed by Manu Satyan, a Kerala district forest officer, and Jose Louies, director of the Wildlife Trust of India, to more efficiently track and reduce the growing incidences of illegal wildlife trade in India. Its roots trace back to 2017, when Louies and Satyan learned about an app-based counter-poaching initiative known as tenBoma, which was created by the International Fund for Animal Welfare to protect Kenyan wildlife. The U.S. military had helped in the project by sharing intelligence-gathering methods used in counterterrorism efforts. The Kenyan app identifies poaching hot spots, and authorities then work with local communities in those hot spots to track poachers and suspicious activities.
Satyan said they recognized that India also needed to develop a database to track habitual offenders who target endangered or trophy animals such as tigers, elephants, and other species that have high commercial value. And so they got to work on HAWK. Before the app was rolled out in Kerala in August 2020, Louies and Satyan consulted with the forest staff about their experience fighting wildlife crime—how poachers tend to enter forests, what suspicious vehicles might look like, and the various challenges for reporting. Once they had a prototype, they asked the forest officers to test it.
Pranesh Prakash, co-founder of the Centre for Internet and Society, an India-based nonprofit that researches digital privacy, said it’s well known in criminology that a small percentage of people commit a significant percentage of crime, so apps like HAWK seem to be a good step. “But where there is documentation, especially of crime, the question arises of how the data will be used and who it will be available to, and for how long it will be stored,” he said in a message. Digital surveillance disproportionately affects low-income populations, and studies have shown that poverty and lack of economic opportunities are the main drivers of poaching. And although apps can track the people participating in poaching on the ground, it’s much harder to track the people behind them, those who are ultimately profiting.
Because the illegal wildlife trade is run by organized criminal networks, intelligence is crucial to curtail illegal trade or apprehend people engaged in it across state and international borders. In developing the app, Satyan and Louies connected with two U.S. military intelligence analysts who briefed them on the rules and methods for developing an intelligence gathering and processing system. “One concept that came from them is assessing the threat level of a habitual offender,” Louies said.
HAWK profiles suspected habitual offenders through interviews and other data gathering, which allow officers to register age, health, financial situation, current activity, and travel patterns. The system assigns a threat level from 1 to 10 and predicts the possibility the suspect will engage in criminal activity. If a habitual offender is very active, in good health, and in need of money, he may be put on a threat level of 8 or 9. HAWK also has separate databases on animal deaths and unregistered or suspicious vehicles entering forest areas. The system hopes to use the data on habitual offenders and their threat level, along with their expertise in animals (each poacher usually specializes in one type of animal), and correlate it with suspicious activity, such as animal injuries or the presence of snares or traps in the forest. Ultimately, the goal is to predict potential crimes. “The entire concept of HAWK is not to catch people when they commit a crime, but to prevent crime from happening,” Louies said.
Applied to other contexts, these sorts of tactics have generated controversy, and Andrew Ferguson, a law professor and the author of the book The Rise in Big Data Policing, said predictive policing has largely failed in the U.S. “However, the geographic limits, unusual movements, and specific triggers and patterns of poaching and wildlife crime might be more predictable than most crimes,” he said in an email. “Also, the number of suspects is rather small, and the resale market limited, so tracking the patterns makes a good bit more sense than other crimes.”
The app isn’t able to make predictions yet, because it doesn’t have enough data—but it hopes to be able to do so within two years. For now, field staff in Kerala uses the app to enter data when it encounters a crime, and HAWK then generates the documents an officer needs to print out and submit the crime in court. Since the system’s rollout in Kerala in August 2020, HAWK’s documentation process has streamlined investigations that were once “a mess,” said Aneesh Joseph, an assistant prosecutor at the High Court of Kerala. The previous system required officers to manually fill out the documents, a process that was prone to errors, manipulation, and missing data, and often led to delays in registering the crime, allowing the accused to get off scot-free, Satyan said. Once a case has been registered through the app, it can’t be manipulated, which is beneficial to both the prosecutor and the accused, Joseph said.
ADVERTISEMENT
The court proceedings—such as witnesses’ depositions, trial date, and investigation history—are also captured in the HAWK system, and all government witnesses are given a temporary login so they can see the case history. “The process is transparent; any officer can see what is happening, and mistakes are reduced,” Satyan said. Before the new documentation system, there were instances of a crime location’s being incorrectly recorded, or poaching being erroneously registered as accidental death.Still, there are challenges: HAWK doesn’t yet have a way to directly interface with court systems. Instead, computer-generated printouts are submitted to court, and only then does the court take on the case. Similarly, if a crime happens in a remote area, it can take several hours, or even a day, to get to an area with internet connectivity good enough to enter the details in the HAWK application, Raghavan said. The interface is better on a computer, so the officers prefer to reach the forest office to enter the details in the desktop system, which can cause further delay.
Prakash, of the Centre for Internet and Society, said tracking and listing repeat offenders in an app is not necessarily harmful by itself. “But the need to track offenders to decrease wildlife crimes needs to be weighed against the right of people to not be constantly surveilled,” he said. “These two countervailing concerns can be addressed by limiting the time that someone is tagged as a target for surveillance, and by restricting the data to only officials who need it.” He added that someone who hasn’t committed a crime in a particular time frame (say, in the past year) should not be subject to heightened surveillance. “Once the personal data has outlived its utility, it should be removed.”
HAWK has now been included in the Kerala forest department’s monthly review—which tracks wildlife deaths, crime reports, and the status of court cases and investigations. This allows the department to better monitor case outcomes. Louies and Satyan, meanwhile, are planning to scale HAWK for use across the entire country. In 2022 HAWK was introduced in the state of Karnataka, and is slated to be implemented this year in two additional states, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. “Once there is a good database from around the country, we can know if a suspect has a prior record elsewhere,” Joseph, the prosecutor, said. “That will be much more effective, as previous conviction warrants a higher penalty.”
,
Read More »Brick by brick: British Manufacturers Building A Better Future For Birds
July 3rd, 2023
Via The Guardian, a report on a simple but critical innovation that can help ensure a better future for birds:
At first, it is hard to spot. A small hole in the eaves is often all that can be seen. It’s only on closer inspection that a hollow brick can be discerned, slotted neatly into a wall. Inside might be a pair of nesting swifts that have travelled thousands of miles from Africa to the UK.
At Manthorpe Building Products’ factory in Derbyshire, it takes just under a minute to produce a single swift brick that could provide a safe haven for generations of these migratory birds. Granules of recycled plastic are put into an injection moulding machine and, moments later, the separate parts of the brick come out, before a worker snaps them together.
Manthorpe has already made 20,000 bricks. Dozens of workers in hi-vis vests group around futuristic-looking machines, producing a wide range of building products from loft hatches to drains. Yet it’s the swift bricks that have proved a surprise hit, with demand steadily increasing year on year, says the company’s managing director, Paul Manning.
The Manthorpe swift nesting brick is made from long-lasting PVC and polypropylene. Photograph: Courtesy of Manthorpe Building Products
Things could be about to get busier. A petition to make swift bricks compulsory in all new housing in the UK has more than 100,000 signatures and will be debated in parliament on 10 July. It will be an uphill battle, though. In its response to the petition, the government made clear that it “considers this a matter for local authorities depending upon the specific circumstances of each site”.Campaigners argue that these bricks are desperately needed amid the relentless decline of swifts in the UK. The species was added to the “red list” of endangered birds in 2021 after its population fell by 58% from 1995-2018.
Swifts are celebrated for their endurance, spending 10 months of the year entirely airborne. They feed on insects and mate in the sky, they drink by gliding over smooth water and bathe by flying slowly through rain. To sleep, they close one eye and half of their brain at a time. Swifts only land to breed, returning to the same nest site for a few short months to raise their young.
However, renovations in old buildings are closing up the holes in walls where they used to nest and new buildings block them out, too. Plummeting insect populations are also a factor in the species’ decline but nest loss is a problem with a simple solution: swift bricks and boxes.
Bricks are the preferred option as they slot discreetly into a wall, offer a cooler environment for the birds, do not require any maintenance and should last the lifetime of a building. The first swift bricks were designed about 30 years ago, but since then there has been a huge rise in demand with dozens of models now available. Prices vary between £15 and £176 and many are compatible with UK brick sizes, meeting the requirements of the British Standard for internal built-in nest boxes for swifts and other wildlife.
Developed in conjunction with the RSPB and the house building industry, the brick being produced by Manthorpe has a grippy finish in the entrance tunnel to help swifts land, a concave dish to make nest building easier, as well as internal channels for drainage, and tabs to aid bricklaying. Mike Challinor, the development and technical director at Manthorpe, tested a range of 3D prototypes, from a binocular-shaped model to one with an external ledge, before settling on the final design. “The brick had to work for the housebuilder as well as the swifts because they wouldn’t be used otherwise,” he says.
Ibstock is another swift brick manufacturer that has seen demand grow, with 7,000 units sold so far. The design of the slim clay box evolved after the discovery that some bricklayers were fitting them upside down. “If that happens, the swift chicks may not be able to get out of the hole,” says Ian Downie, Ibstock’s national specials champion. Ibstock began spraying “top” on the boxes with a picture to prevent this happening, while a nesting ledge was also added inside “to prevent the eggs from rolling out”.
Swift bricks are usually installed in new buildings or during major renovations, but it is possible to retrofit them into an existing wall. Action for Swifts founder Dick Newell designed the S Brick for this purpose and has sold 3,000 of them since 2020. As well as supplying individual swift enthusiasts, the organisation recently sold 30 bricks to a Cambridge project after it forgot to install nest sites. Newell laments that “new houses exclude all wildlife” and estimates that we need at least 250,000 swift bricks and boxes in place to restore swift numbers lost in the last 25 years.
“The great advantage of swift bricks and boxes is that they can work just as well in inner city areas with very little green space as anywhere else,” says Dr Guy Anderson, the RSPB’s migratory birds programme manager. “Swifts can travel pretty long distances to find their insect food – all they need is a nest site.” Even if swifts don’t make a home in them, the bricks can be used by other species, including house martins, starlings, great tits and house sparrows.
Examples of swift brick victories include redevelopments of housing estates, such as the Windmill Estate in South Cambridgeshire where more than 250 swift bricks and boxes have been installed since 2009. Barratt Developments has installed more than 4,000 swift bricks in new housing developments since 2016 – with plans for 7,000 by 2025 – and there are at least 68 local authority and neighbourhood plans with wording for nest box or swift brick provision, according to the Swift Local Network group. The RSPB says that since Brighton and Hove city council introduced a planning condition requiring new buildings to include swift bricks, at least 130 of them have been installed across the city.
Some campaigners argue, however, that this provision is too patchy and that a national strategy is required. Hannah Bourne-Taylor, who started the petition to make swift bricks compulsory across the UK, says that such a policy could help the government meet its biodiversity targets and is a “no-brainer” in terms of its simplicity and effectiveness. “Swifts are our closest wild neighbours and the poster children of biodiversity,” she says. “If they lose, we lose.”
,
Read More »Robots Help Seagrass Restoration
July 1st, 2023
Via BBC, a look at how robots are helping seagrass restoration:
Wales could become a world leader in large-scale seagrass restoration science following successful trials using robots.
Seagrass is known for its ability to store carbon and provide nurseries for fish.
Up to 92% of UK seagrass has been lost, but Wales could lead on restoration, conservationists have said.
The Welsh government said it would discuss how to further support seagrass restoration.
Project Seagrass, WWF and the Swansea University said the country could also produce methodology that could be applied across the world.
The Seagrass Ocean Rescue Upscaling Project (SORUP) in Wales aims to create a blueprint that can be applied to other countries.
In Dale Bay, Pembrokeshire, WWF and Project Seagrass led the UK’s first successful seagrass restoration methodological trials and meadow scale restoration project.
It was the UK’s first seagrass restoration project at a meaningful scale and experts are now developing and trialling technology and methods to make it easier and more cost effective to restore at scale.
SORUP has been using a robot to help plant the seeds at the restoration site in Dale, said manager, Sam Rees.
The robot, called Shack and designed by Reefgen in San Francisco, holds 20,000 seeds mixed with mud which it injects into the sediment in the seabed.
“The aim of our project is to take knowledge that we’ve learnt already and improve upon it and improve the methodology of seagrass restoration, improve its cost efficiency, its time efficiency and the resources that we use to do it,” Mr Rees said.
“We’ve already stored two hectares here using hand-based methods, but we’re now looking how we can improve on that, taking away some of the people it required and using the robot to do that,” he said.
According to Leanne Cullen-Unsworth, CEO of Project Seagrass, taking the lead in this field could bring international opportunities.
“We’re in such a good position to be sharing the message with the rest of the world about how important this habitat is, that we can lead on the science to put this habitat back.
“We’ve got the scientific expertise and the goodwill in place to be able to restore at scale.”
“The Welsh government had said quite a long time ago that they were going to make a commitment to seagrass and the marine environment more broadly and we just want that to be defined, we want to work with them to develop a programme that is going to help and protect seagrass.”
The Welsh government said it wanted to work with nature to help fight the climate and nature emergencies, adding that was why First Minister Mark Drakeford included seagrass restoration in his programme for government.
“The minister is looking forward to visiting Project Seagrass and WWF Cymru this summer to see their plantation work in action and discuss what action we can take to scale-up their vital work,” a spokesman said.
,
Read More »