The Algorithmic Ocean: How AI Is Revolutionizing Marine Conservation
April 26th, 2024
Via MIT Press Reader, a look at how AI is revolutionizing the effort to combat illegal fishing:
Dyhia Belhabib’s journey to becoming a marine scientist began with war funerals on TV. Her hometown, on the pine-forested slopes of the Atlas Mountains in northern Algeria, lies only 60 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. But a trip to the beach was dangerous. A bitter civil war raged across the mountains as she was growing up in the 1990s; the conflict was particularly brutal for Belhabib’s people, the Berbers, one of the Indigenous peoples of North Africa. As she puts it: “We didn’t go to the ocean much, because you could get killed on the way there.”
The ocean surfaced in her life in another way, on state-run television. When an important person was assassinated or a massacre occurred, broadcasters would interrupt regular programming to show a sober documentary. They frequently chose a Jacques Cousteau film, judged sufficiently dignified and neutral to commemorate the deaths. Whenever she saw the ocean on television, Belhabib would wonder who had died. “My generation thinks of tragedies when we see the ocean,” she says. “I didn’t grow to love it in my youth.”
By the time she was ready for university, the civil war had ended. The Islamists had lost the war, but their cultural influence had grown. Engaged at 13 to a fiancé who wanted her to become a banker, Belhabib chafed at the restrictions. Her given name, Dyhia, refers to a Berber warrior queen who successfully fought off invading Arab armies over a thousand years ago; Queen Kahina, as she is also known, remains a symbol of female empowerment, an inspiration for Berbers and for the thousands of Algerian women who took up arms in the war of independence. In a society where one in four women cannot read, Belhabib realized she didn’t want to go to university only to spend her life “counting other people’s money.”
Preview thumbnail for ‘Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth
Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth
This riveting book explores the promise and pitfalls the Digital Age holds for the future of our planet.One day, her brother’s friend visited their house. He was a student in marine sciences in the capital city, Algiers. When he described traveling out to sea, Belhabib felt a calling for an entirely unexpected path. “It was,” she recalls, “a career I had never heard of, and one that challenged every stereotype of women in Algerian society.” Soon after the visit, she moved to Algiers to study at the National Institute of Marine Sciences and Coastal Management, where she was one of the only women in her program. She also broke off the engagement with her fiancé, so that she could focus full-time on studies. She still vividly remembers her feelings of freedom, fear and unreality on her first trip out to sea. While other students dove for samples, she floated on top of the water, trying to survive. “I never learned how to swim, and I still don’t know how,” she admits.
Belhabib graduated at the top of her class but was repeatedly rejected when she applied to universities overseas. Her luck turned when she met Daniel Pauly, one of the world’s most famous fish scientists, at a conference. Unintimidated by the fact that Pauly had just won the Volvo Prize—the environmental equivalent of a Nobel—she introduced herself and told him she wanted to study with his team. Although she did not yet speak fluent English, Pauly accepted her as a student. When she began her doctoral research, over 90 percent of the world’s wild fisheries had been eradicated, and Pauly was sounding the alarm about a new, global surge in illegal fishing that was decimating marine food webs and depriving coastal communities of livelihoods. He wanted her to work on Africa, where illegal fishing had reached epidemic proportions.
Belhabib spent the next few years in West Africa. When her research uncovered the extent of illegal fishing to feed Chinese and European markets, she made the front page of the New York Times. “Being African myself, I was able to bring people together to openly share data in a way they never had before,” she explains. It’s not hard to imagine her corralling government officials: Disarmingly frank and engagingly energetic, the whip-smart, hijab-wearing Belhabib stands a little over five feet tall and talks a mile a minute, with a self-deprecating laugh and a talent for gently posed, bitingly direct questions.
Her startling findings touched a nerve. Tens of thousands of boats commit fishing crimes every year, but no global repository of fishing crimes exists. A fishing vessel will often commit a crime in one jurisdiction, pay a meager fine, and sail off to another jurisdiction, thus operating with impunity. If a global database of fishing vessel criminal records could be created, Belhabib realized, there would be nowhere left to hide. She suggested the idea to a variety of international organizations, but the issue was a political hot potato; national sovereignty, they argued, prevented them from tracking international criminals. Undeterred, Belhabib decided to build the database herself. Late at night, while her infant son was sleeping, she began combing through government reports and news articles in dozens of languages (she speaks several fluently). Her database grew, word spread and her network of informants—often government officials frustrated with international inaction on illegal fishing—began expanding. She moved to a small nonprofit and began advising Interpol and national governments. The database, christened Spyglass, grew into the world’s largest registry of the criminal history of industrial fishing vessels and their corporate backers. But the registry, Belhabib knew, was useful only if the information made its way into the right hands. So in 2021 she co-founded Nautical Crime Investigation Services, a startup that uses artificial intelligence and customized monitoring technology to enable more effective policing of marine crimes and criminal vessels at sea. Together with her co-founder Sogol Ghattan, who has a background in ethical A.I., she named their core algorithm ADA, in homage to Ada Lovelace—the woman who wrote the world’s first computer program.
Belhabib is attempting to tackle one of the most intractable problems in contemporary environmental conservation: illegal fishing. Across the oceans, the difficulty of tracking ships creates ideal cover for some of the world’s largest environmental crimes. After the end of World War II, the world’s fishing fleets rapidly industrialized. Wartime technologies that had been developed for detecting underwater submarines were repurposed for spotting fish. The size of nets grew exponentially, and offshore factory ships were outfitted so they could spend months at sea, extending the reach of industrial fishing into the furthest reaches of the ocean. As the world’s population grew, fish protein became an increasingly important source of food. But warning signs soon appeared: crashes in key fish populations, an alarming trend of “fishing down marine food webs,” and a series of cascading impacts that rapidly depleted marine ecosystems.
In the wake of depleting stocks, fishers should have responded by reducing their take. Instead, they redoubled their efforts. After the world’s leading fishing nations—China and Europe are the largest markets—overfished their own waters, they began exporting industrial overfishing to the global oceans. China’s offshore fishing fleet of several hundred thousand vessels, which received nearly $8 billion in government subsidies in 2018, is now the largest in the world.
Governments of wealthier nations subsidized massive fleets of corporate-backed vessels to fish the high seas, using bottom trawling and drift nets stretching for dozens of miles, killing everything in their path. Artisanal fishers were squeezed out, and as fish stocks collapsed, rising food insecurity generated protests and political unrest. In West Africa, for example, fishing boats from the world’s wealthiest nations have depleted local fisheries to such an extent that waves of migrants—faced with food insecurity and uncertain futures—have begun fleeing their homes in a desperate, risky attempt to reach European outposts such as the Spanish Canary Islands; thousands of migrants have died at sea. The smaller fishing fleet, meanwhile, has struggled to remain solvent; impoverished fishers are increasingly vulnerable targets for criminal organizations seeking mules for hire to transport drugs, or boats to serve as cover operations for human trafficking.
Over 90 percent of the world’s fish stocks are now fished to capacity or overfished. Despite this, scientists’ calls for reduced fishing have largely fallen on deaf ears. Conventional attempts to manage fisheries are stymied by the limits of logbooks and onboard human observers, and local electronic monitoring systems. Fishing boats that exceed quotas or fish in off-limits areas are rarely caught, operating with impunity in front of local fishermen’s eyes; and even if caught, they are even more rarely punished.
Marine panopticon
The world’s oceans are experiencing an onslaught: As fish have become scarcer, illegal fishing has surged. Rather than merely document the decline of fish stock, Belhabib decided to do something about it. Her solution: to combine ADA, her A.I.-powered database of marine crimes, with data that tracks vessel movements in real time. She began by tracking signals from the marine traffic transponders carried by oceangoing ships—also known as automatic information systems (AIS). AIS signals are detected by land transceivers or satellites and used to track and monitor individual vessel movements around the world. AIS signals are also detected by other ships in the vicinity, reducing the potential for ship collisions. Belhabib and her team then built an A.I.-powered risk assessment tool called GRACE (in honor of the pioneering coder Grace Hopper), which predicts risks of environmental crimes at sea. When combined with vessel detection devices such as AIS, GRACE provides real-time information on the likelihood of a particular ship committing environmental crimes, which can be used by enforcement agencies to catch the criminals in the act. Belhabib’s database means that criminal vessels—which often engage in multiple forms of crime, including human trafficking and drug smuggling, as well as illegal fishing—now find it much harder to hide.The high seas are one of the world’s last global commons, largely unregulated. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provides little protection for the high seas, two-thirds of the ocean’s surface. The adoption of a new U.N. treaty on the high seas in 2023 will create more protection, but this will require years to be implemented. Even within 200 nautical miles of the coast, where national authorities have legal jurisdiction, most struggle to monitor the oceans beyond the areas a few miles from the coast. And beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit, no one effectively governs the open ocean.
So Belhabib hands her data on human rights and labor abuses over to Global Fishing Watch, a not-for-profit organization that collaborates with the national coast guards and Interpol to target vessels suspected of illegal fishing for boarding, apprehend rogue fishing vessels and police the boundaries of marine parks. The observatory visualizes, tracks and shares data about global fishing activity in near real time and for free; launched at the 2016 U.S. State Department’s “Our Ocean” conference in Washington, it is backed by some of the world’s largest foundations. Its partners include Google (which provides tools for processing big data), the marine conservation organization Oceana and SkyTruth—a not-for-profit that uses satellite imagery to advance environmental protection.
Global Fishing Watch uses satellite data on boat location, combined with Belhabib’s data on criminal activity, to train artificial intelligence algorithms to identify vessel types, fishing activity patterns and even specific gear types (tasks that would require human fisheries experts hundreds of years to complete). The tracking system pinpoints each individual fishing vessel with laser-like accuracy, predicts whether it is actually fishing and even identifies what type of fishing is underway. Its reports have revealed that half of the global ocean is actively fished, much of it covertly.
Fred Abrahams, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, explains that this approach is just one example of a new generation of conservation technology that could act as a check on anyone engaged in resource exploitation. His team at Human Rights Watch uses satellite imagery to track everything from illegal mining to undercover logging operations. As Abrahams tells the New York Times: “This is why we are so committed to these technologies … they make it that much harder to hide large-scale abuses.” Abrahams, like other advocates, is confident that the glitches—for example, AIS tags are not yet carried by all fishing vessels globally, poor reception makes coverage in some regions challenging, and some boats turn off the AIS when they want to go into stealth mode—will eventually be solved. Researchers have recently figured out, for example, how to use satellites to triangulate the position of fishing boats in stealth mode—enabling tracking of so-called dark fleets. These results can inform a new era of independent oversight of illegal fishing and transboundary fisheries. Meanwhile, researchers are developing other applications for AIS data, including assessments of the contribution of ship exhaust emissions to global air pollution, the exposure of marine species to shipping noise, and the extent of forced labor—often hidden, and linked to human trafficking—on the world’s fishing fleets.
It’s a herculean task for one organization to police the world’s oceans. And Global Fishing Watch’s data is mostly retroactive; by the time the data is analyzed and the authorities have arrived, fishing vessels have often left the scene. What is still lacking is a method for marine criminals to be more effectively tracked in real time, and apprehended locally. This is where Belhabib’s next venture comes in. She is now working with local governments in Africa—where much illegal fishing is concentrated—to provide them with trackers and A.I.-powered technologies to catch illegal fishing and other maritime crimes in the act. As she notes: “When you ask the Guinean Navy how much of their territorial waters they can actually monitor, it’s only a fraction of a vast area. They simply don’t have the resources.” Belhabib’s system pinpoints vessels that may be committing infractions and assesses the risk live on screen. This allows local security forces and other agencies such as Interpol to more easily find illegal fishers, while reducing the costs of deployment, monitoring and interdiction.
She cautions, however, about the use of similar digital technologies to track illegal migration. The European Union, for example, has strengthened its “digital frontier” through satellite monitoring, unmanned drones and remotely piloted aircraft, in some cases relying on private security and defense companies to undertake data analytics and tracking. But these technologies are often focused on surveillance rather than search and rescue of migrants stranded at sea. As Belhabib relates: “Recently I spoke with the Spanish Navy, and they told me they watched over 100 people die when a boat full of migrants capsized and they could only save a few people. They told me, ‘We take their fish away, they risk their lives to have a better and decent life.’ It’s heartbreaking and avoidable.” In Belhabib’s view, Digital Earth technologies, as tools such as hers are known, should prioritize ecological and humanitarian goals, rather than surveillance and profit.
Digital Earth technologies enable more rapid detection and, in some cases, prediction of marine crimes. Digital monitoring, combined with artificial intelligence, allows precise analysis of fishing vessel locations and movements at a global scale. Although this does not guarantee enforcement, it could enable more efficient policing of the world’s oceans. The use of digital technologies enables conservationists to tackle two common flaws that lead to failures in environmental enforcement. First: Data is scarce; if available, there is often a time lag, geographical gaps or data biases. This makes evidence-gathering difficult or impossible. Second, enforcement often comes too late. Environmental criminals can be prosecuted, but legal victories are uncertain, and they happen after the damage has been done. These shortcomings of contemporary environmental governance—sparse data; unenforceable regulations; and patchy, sporadic enforcement that punishes but fails to prevent environmental harm—can be overcome by digital monitoring, which mobilizes abundant data in real time to gather systematic evidence and enable timely enforcement.
These techniques appear to be achieving some success. In Ghana, for example, there has been a long-standing conflict between industrial fishing boats and small-scale, artisanal fishers using canoes and small boats to fish near the shore. Satellite data has helped the government’s Fisheries Enforcement Unit track and reduce the incursions of larger fishing boats into near-shore waters. In Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago country with the second-longest coastline in the world, the government has entered into an agreement with Global Fishing Watch data to monitor fisheries and share the data about vessels’ movements publicly online, a major step forward in transparency in fisheries enforcement. The Indonesian partnership is an example of the longer-term aim of Global Fishing Watch: to share its geospatial data sets and online mapping platform with governments around the world.
Despite these recent gains to combat illegal fishing, digital tech is also exacerbating the underlying problem, as fishers themselves have started taking advantage of digital strategies. One example is the growing use of fish aggregating devices, which use acoustic technology, combined with satellite-linked global positioning systems, to better spot schools of fish. Fishers can effectively assess location, biomass and even species, allowing them to aggregate and fish more efficiently. Digitization is ratcheting up the already intensely competitive fishing industry and accelerating the overfishing of endangered species.
Even if conservationists can win this digital arms race, there is a more fundamental problem: The underlying structural drivers of overfishing—consumer demand, particularly in Asia and Europe, and a lack of adequate governance for the high seas—are not solvable by digital technologies alone. Governance reform and digital innovation must work in tandem. For example, in the absence of government regulation, digital monitoring of fishing on the open ocean would be unlikely to scale up. But the adoption of the new U.N. treaty on the high seas in 2023 included a significant commitment to creating new Marine Protected Areas, aligned with the Global Biodiversity Convention’s commitment to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s land and oceans by 2030.
These new developments create an impetus for digital monitoring; and, in turn, digital monitoring will increase the likelihood that Marine Protected Areas will be effective at protecting fish populations. This illustrates two key points about environmental governance in the 21st century: the interplay between digital and governance innovation, and the fact that planetary governance of the environment is possible only with planetary-scale computation.
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Read More »Why Scientists Are Bugging the Rainforest
October 18th, 2023
Via Wired, an article on how some scientists are using microphones and AI to automatically detect species by their chirps and croaks. This bioacoustics research could be critical for protecting ecosystems on a warming planet.
THERE’S MUCH, MUCH more to the rainforest than meets the eye. Even a highly trained observer can struggle to pick out individual animals in the tangle of plant life—animals that are often specifically adapted to hide from their enemies. Listen to the music of the forest, though, and you can get a decent idea of the species by their chirps, croaks, and grunts.
This is why scientists are increasingly bugging rainforests with microphones—a burgeoning field known as bioacoustics—and using AI to automatically parse sounds to identify species. Writing today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers describe a proof-of-concept project in the lowland Chocó region of Ecuador that shows the potential power of bioacoustics in conserving forests.
“Biodiversity monitoring has always been an expensive and difficult endeavor,” says entomologist and ecologist David Donoso of Ecuador’s National Polytechnic School, a coauthor of the paper. “The problem only worsens when you consider that good monitoring programs require many years of data to fully understand the dynamics of the system, and how specific problems affect these dynamics.”
The researchers picked over 40 sites across different landscape types, including active agricultural lands, plantations that had been abandoned for decades (and are recovering ecologically), and intact, old-growth forest. Below, you can see the instruments they deployed. At left is a microphone that recorded sound for two minutes every 15 minutes, so it didn’t drain its battery as quickly as recording 24/7. At right is a light trap for catching insects.
Once the team had these recordings, they tapped experts to identify birds and amphibians by their vocalizations, and used DNA from the light traps to identify nocturnal insects. They also used AI to identify the bird species by sound.
“We can say the scientific part is basically solved, so the AI models work,” says conservation ecologist Jörg Müller of the University of Würzburg in Germany, lead author of the paper. “It’s fine-scale, high-quality. And the nice thing is that you can store the data.” Several years of recordings will track how the forest ecosystem evolves over time, with species populations waxing or waning as new arrivals colonize the terrain, or as climate change affects which struggle or thrive in hotter, drier conditions.
In particular, scientists and conservationists are interested in learning about the composition of species that return to disturbed environments. In Ecuador, the agricultural land tends to attract birds from southern parts of South America with their natural open areas, which are similar to the Pampas grasslands. “So it could be that you have the same number of species in agriculture and all those forests, but totally different ones,” says Müller. “These habitats are not empty—they are full of birds—but not the original fauna from primeval forests.”
Researchers are also trying to track animals that are responding to a complex set of overlapping environmental stressors. Forest health used to primarily be a problem of deforestation. Now it is a far more complicated set of problems stemming from global climate change and land use. The Amazon, for instance, is threatened by both loggers and severe droughts.
One of the challenges of field observation is that it requires humans, who are very big mammals, to go traipsing through the forest, altering its normal bustle. But a microphone simply listens, a camera trap quietly watches for movement and snaps a picture, and a light trap silently attracts insects.
The study’s recordings picked up the ??purple-chested hummingbird, shown at top, and the extremely rare banded ground cuckoo, shown below. “This is the holy grail for ornithologists. Some ornithologists go to Ecuador for 30 years to see the bird and never see them,” says Müller. “And we report it with sound recorders and with camera traps. So it shows another advantage from these recorders: They do not disturb.”
Bioacoustics can’t fully replace ecology fieldwork, but can provide reams of data that would be extremely expensive to collect by merely sending scientists to remote areas for long stretches of time. With bioacoustic instruments, researchers must return to collect the data and swap batteries, but otherwise the technology can work uninterrupted for years. “Scaling sampling from 10, 100, [or] 1,000 sound recorders is much easier than training 10, 100, 1,000 people to go to a forest at the same time,” says Donoso.
“The need for this kind of rigorous assessment is enormous. It will never be cost-effective to have a kind of boots-on-the-ground approach,” agrees Eddie Game, the Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist and director of conservation for the Asia Pacific region, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “Even in relatively well-studied places it would be difficult, but certainly, in a tropical forest environment where that diversity of species is so extraordinary, it’s really difficult.”
A limitation, of course, is that while birds, insects, and frogs make a whole lot of noise, many species do not vocalize. A microphone would struggle to pick up the presence of a butterfly or a snake.
But no one’s suggesting that bioacoustics alone can quantify the biodiversity of a forest. As with the current experiment, bioacoustics work will be combined with the use of cameras, field researchers, and DNA collection. While this team harvested DNA directly from insects caught in light traps, others may collect environmental DNA, or eDNA, that animals leave behind in soil, air, and water. In June, for instance, a separate team showed how they used the filters at air quality stations to identify DNA that had been carried by the wind. In the future, ecologists might be able to sample forest soils to get an idea of what animals moved through the area. But while bioacoustics can continuously monitor for species, and eDNA can record clues about which ones crossed certain turf, only an ecologist can observe how those species might be interacting—who’s hunting who, for instance, or what kind of bird might be outcompeting another.
The bioacoustics data from the new study suggests that Ecuador’s forests can recover beautifully after small-scale pastures and cacao plantations are abandoned. For instance, the researchers found the banded ground cuckoo already in 30-year-old recovery forests. “Even our professional collaborators were surprised at how well the recovery forests were colonized by so-called old-growth species,” says Müller. “In comparison to Europe, they do it very quickly. So after, let’s say, 40, 50 years, it’s not fully an old-growth forest. But most of these very rare species can make use of this as a habitat, and thereby expand their population.”
This technology will also be helpful for monitoring forest recovery—to confirm, for example, that governments are actually restoring the areas they say they are. Satellite images can show that new trees have been planted, but they’re not proof of a healthy ecosystem or of biodiversity. “I think any ecologist would tell you that trees don’t make a forest ecosystem,” says Game. The cacophony of birds and insects and frogs—a thriving, complex mix of rainforest species—do.
“I think we’re just going to keep on learning so much more about what sound can tell us about the environment,” says Game, who compares bioacoustics to NASA’s Landsat program, which opened up satellite imagery to the scientific community and led to key research on climate change and wildfire damage. “It was radically transformational in the way we looked at the Earth. Sound has some similar potential to that,” he says.
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Read More »Nature Generates More Data Than The Internet … For Now
September 26th, 2023
Via Popular Science, a look at how – in the next century – the information transmitted over the internet might eclipse the information shared between Earth’s most abundant lifeforms:
Is Earth primarily a planet of life, a world stewarded by the animals, plants, bacteria, and everything else that lives here? Or, is it a planet dominated by human creations? Certainly, we’ve reshaped our home in many ways—from pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to literally redrawing coastlines. But by one measure, biology wins without a contest.
In an opinion piece published in the journal Life on August 31, astronomers and astrobiologists estimated the amount of information transmitted by a massive class of organisms and technology for communication. Their results are clear: Earth’s biosphere churns out far more information than the internet has in its 30-year history. “This indicates that, for all the rapid progress achieved by humans, nature is still far more remarkable in terms of its complexity,” says Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology and one of the paper’s authors.
But that could change in the very near future. Lingam and his colleagues say that, if the internet keeps growing at its current voracious rate, it will eclipse the data that comes out of the biosphere in less than a century. This could help us hone our search for intelligent life on other planets by telling us what type of information we should seek.
To represent information from technology, the authors focused on the amount of data transferred through the internet, which far outweighs any other form of human communication. Each second, the internet carries about 40 terabytes of information. They then compared it to the volume of information flowing through Earth’s biosphere. We might not think of the natural world as a realm of big data, but living things have their own ways of communicating. “To my way of thought, one of the reasons—although not the only one—underpinning the complexity of the biosphere is the massive amount of information flow associated with it,” Lingam says.
Bird calls, whale song, and pheromones are all forms of communication, to be sure. But Lingam and his colleagues focused on the information that individual cells transmit—often in the form of molecules that other cells pick up and respond accordingly, such as producing particular proteins. The authors specifically focused on the 100 octillion single-celled prokaryotes that make up the majority of our planet’s biomass.
“That is fairly representative of most life on Earth,” says Andrew Rushby, an astrobiologist at Birkbeck, University of London, who was not an author of the paper. “Just a green slime clinging to the surface of the planet. With a couple of primates running around on it, occasionally.”
This colorized image shows an intricate colony of millions of the single-celled bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa that have self-organized into a sticky, mat-like colony called a biofilm, which allows them to cooperate with each other, adapt to changes in their environment, and ensure their survival. Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter, Harvard Medical School, Boston
As all of Earth’s prokaryotes signal to each other, according to the authors’ estimate, they generate around a billion times as much data as our technology. But human progress is rapid: According to one estimate, the internet is growing by around 26 percent every year. Under the bold assumption that both these rates hold steady for decades to come, the authors stated its size will continue to balloon until it dwarfs the biosphere in around 90 years’ time, sometime in the early 22nd century.What, then, does a world where we create more information than nature actually look like? It’s hard to predict for certain. The 2110s version of Earth may be as strange to us as the present Earth would seem to a person from the 1930s. That said, picture alien astronomers in another star system carefully monitoring our planet. Rather than glimpsing a planet teeming with natural life, their first impressions of Earth might be a torrent of digital data.
Now, picture the reverse. For decades, scientists and military experts have sought out signatures of extraterrestrials in whatever form it may take. Astronomers have traditionally focused on the energy that a civilization of intelligent life might use—but earlier this year, one group crunched the numbers to determine if aliens in a nearby star system could pick up the leakage from mobile phone towers. (The answer is probably not, at least with LTE networks and technology like today’s radio telescopes.)
On the flip side, we don’t totally have the observational capabilities to home in on extraterrestrial life yet. “I don’t think there’s any way that we could detect the kind of predictions and findings that [Lingam and his coauthors] have quantified here,” Rushby says. “How can we remotely determine this kind of information capacity, or this information transfer rate? We’re probably not at the stage where we could do that.”
But Rushby thinks the study is an interesting next step in a trend. Astrobiologists—certainly those searching for extraterrestrial life—are increasingly thinking about the types and volume of information that different forms of life carries. “There does seem to be this information ‘revolution,’” he says, “where we’re thinking about life in a slightly different way.” In the end, we might learn that there’s more harmony between the communication networks nature has built and computers.
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Read More »Animal CSI: Forensics Comes For The Wildlife Trade
September 22nd, 2023
Via Knowable Magazine, a look at how scientists are using the latest in DNA fingerprinting to combat the multibillion-dollar business of trafficking plants and animals:
Campbell’s death was as gruesome as the killers’ previous nine known crimes. Found mutilated in a pool of blood at his home in the district of Albany, South Africa, in June 2016, Campbell had been drugged but was likely in pain before he died from his injuries.
Genetics extends the long arm of the law
Campbell was a white rhinoceros living on a private reserve, and his killing would be the last hurrah of the now notorious Ndlovu Gang. The three poachers were arrested days later at the Makana Resort in Grahamstown, South Africa, caught red-handed with a bow saw, a tranquilizer dart gun and a freshly removed rhino horn. A variety of evidence, including cellphone records and ballistics analysis of the dart gun, would link them to the crime. But a key element was Campbell’s DNA, found in the horn and on the still-bloody saw.Among the scientific techniques used to combat poaching and wildlife trafficking, DNA is king, says Cindy Harper, a veterinary geneticist at the University of Pretoria. Its application in animal investigations is small-scale but growing in a field with a huge volume of crime: The value of the illegal wildlife trade is as much as $20 billion per year, Interpol estimates.
“It’s not just a few people swapping animals around,” says Greta Frankham, a wildlife forensic scientist at the Australian Center for Wildlife Genomics in Sydney. “It’s got links to organized crime; it is an enormous amount of turnover on the black market.”
The problem is global. In the United States, the crime might be the illegal hunting of deer or black bears, the importing of protected-animal parts for food or medicinal use, the harvesting of protected cacti, or the trafficking of ivory trinkets. In Africa or Asia, it might be the poaching of pangolins, the globe’s most trafficked mammal for both its meat and its scales, which are used in traditional medicines and magic practices. In Australia, it might be the collection or export of the continent’s unique wildlife for the pet trade.
The illegal trade of wildlife may include live animals or plants, or parts of them, such as roots, stems, skin, bones or antlers. In the case of tigers and rhinos, trading in products that purport to contain parts of those animals — even if they do not — is also illegal.
Techniques used in wildlife forensics are often direct descendants of tools from human crime investigations, and in recent years scientists have adapted and tailored them for use in animals. Harper and colleagues, for example, learned to extract DNA from rhinoceros horns, a task once thought impossible. And by building DNA databases — akin to the FBI’s CODIS database used for human crimes — forensic geneticists can identify a species and more: They might pinpoint a specimen’s geographic origin, family group, or even, in some cases, link a specific animal or animal part to a crime scene.
Adapting this science to animals has contributed to major crime busts, such as the 2021 arrests in an international poaching and wildlife trafficking ring. And scientists are further refining their techniques in the hopes of identifying more challenging evidence samples, such as hides that have been tanned or otherwise degraded.
“Wildlife trafficking investigations are difficult,” says Robert Hammer, a Seattle-based special agent-in-charge with Homeland Security Investigations, the Department of Homeland Security’s arm for investigating diverse crimes, including those involving smuggling, drugs and gang activity. He and his colleagues, he says, rely on DNA and other forensic evidence “to tell the stories of the animals that have been taken.”
First, identify
Wildlife forensics generally starts with a sample sent to a specialized lab by investigators like Hammer. Whereas people-crime investigators generally want to know “Who is it?” wildlife specialists are more often asked “What is this?” — as in, “What species?” That question could apply to anything from shark fins to wood to bear bile, a liver secretion used in traditional medicines.“We get asked questions about everything from a live animal to a part or a product,” says Barry Baker, deputy laboratory director at the US National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon.
Investigators might also ask whether an animal photographed at an airport is a species protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, in which case import or export is illegal without a permit. They might want to know whether meat brought into the US is from a protected species, such as a nonhuman primate. Or they might want to know if a carved knickknack is real ivory or fake, a difference special lighting can reveal.
While some identifications can be made visually, DNA or other chemical analyses may be required, especially when only part of the creature is available. To identify species, experts turn to the DNA in mitochondria, the cellular energy factories that populate nearly every cell, usually in multiple copies. DNA sequences therein are similar in all animals of the same species, but different between species. By reading those genes and comparing them to sequences in a database such as the Barcode of Life, forensic geneticists can identify a species.
To go further to try to link a specimen to a specific, individual animal, forensic geneticists use the same technique that’s used in human DNA forensics, in this case relying on the majority of DNA contained in the cell’s nucleus. Every genome contains repetitive sequences called microsatellites that vary in length from individual to individual. Measuring several microsatellites creates a DNA fingerprint that is rare, if not unique. In addition, some more advanced techniques use single-letter variations in DNA sequences for fingerprinting.
Comparing the DNA of two samples allows scientists to make a potential match, but it isn’t a clincher: That requires a database of DNA fingerprints from other members of the species to calculate how unlikely it is — say, a one-in-a-million chance — that the two samples came from different individuals. Depending on the species’ genetic diversity and its geographic distribution, a valid database could have as few as 50 individuals or it could require many more, says Ashley Spicer, a wildlife forensic scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in Sacramento. Such databases don’t exist for all animals and, indeed, obtaining DNA samples from even as few as 50 animals could be a challenge for rare or protected species, Spicer notes.
Investigators use these techniques in diverse ways: An animal may be the victim of a crime, the perpetrator or a witness. And if, say, dogs are used to hunt protected animals, investigators could find themselves with animal evidence related to both victim and suspect.
For witnesses, consider the case of a white cat named Snowball. When a woman disappeared in Richmond, on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, in 1994, a bloodstained leather jacket with 27 white cat hairs in the lining was found near her home. Her body was found in a shallow grave in 1995, and the prime suspect was her estranged common-law husband, who lived with his parents and Snowball, their pet. DNA from the root of one of the jacket hairs matched Snowball’s blood. Though the feline never took the stand, the cat’s evidence spoke volumes, helping to clinch a murder conviction in 1996.
A database for rhinos
The same kind of specific linking of individual animal to physical evidence was also a key element in the case of Campbell the white rhino. Rhino horn is prized: It’s used in traditional Chinese medicine and modern variants of the practice to treat conditions from colds to hangovers to cancer, and is also made into ornaments such as cups and beads. At the time of Campbell’s death, his horn, weighing north of 10 kilograms, was probably worth more than $600,000 — more than its weight in gold — on the black market.The DNA forensics that helped nab the Ndlovu Gang started with experiments in the early 2000s, when rhino poaching was on the rise. Scientists once thought rhino horns were nothing but densely packed hair, lacking cells that would include DNA, but a 2006 study showed that cells, too, are present. A few years later, Harper’s group reported that even though these cells were dead, they contained viable DNA, and the researchers figured out how to access it by drilling into the horn’s core.
In 2010, a crime investigator from South Africa’s Kruger National Park dropped by Harper’s lab. He was so excited by the potential of her discovery to combat poaching that he ripped a poster describing her results off the wall, rolled it up and took it away with him. Soon after, Harper launched the Rhinoceros DNA Index System, or RhODIS. (The name is a play on the FBI’s CODIS database, for Combined DNA Index System.)
Today, thanks to 2012 legislation from the South African government, anyone in that nation who handles a rhino or its horn — for example, when dehorning animals for the rhinos’ own protection — must send Harper’s team a sample. RhODIS now contains about 100,000 DNA fingerprints, based on 23 microsatellites, from African rhinoceroses both black and white, alive and long dead, including most of the rhinos in South Africa and Namibia, as well as some from other nations.
RhODIS has assisted with numerous investigations, says Rod Potter, a private consultant and wildlife crime investigator who has worked with the South African Police Service for more than four decades. In one case, he recalls, investigators found a suspect with a horn in his possession and used RhODIS to identify the animal before the owner even knew the rhino was dead.
In Campbell’s case, in 2019 the three poachers were convicted, to cheers from observers in the courtroom, of charges related to 10 incidents. Each gang member was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Today, as rhino poaching has rebounded after a pandemic-induced lull, the RhODIS database remains important. And even when RhODIS can’t link evidence to a specific animal, Potter says, the genetics are often enough to point investigators to the creature’s approximate geographic origin, because genetic markers vary by location and population. And that can help illuminate illegal trade routes.
Elephants also benefit
DNA can make a big impact on investigations into elephant poaching, too. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle, for example, measured DNA microsatellites from roving African elephants as well as seized ivory, then built a database and a geographical map of where different genetic markers occur among elephants. The map helps to determine the geographic source of poached, trafficked tusks seized by law enforcement officials.Two line maps of Africa. The left map shows the origins of ivory seized in the Philippines between 1996 and 2005; the one on the right illustrates origins of ivory seized in Singapore in 2007. Red diamonds mark the ports by which the ivory left Africa. Crosses mark the locations of elephants in a genetic database. Blue circles mark the origins of the seized ivory, based on that database.
Researchers used elephant DNA from animals in different locations (orange crosses) to create a database mapping where different gene markers are likely to occur. This information allows them to pinpoint the elephant populations where seized ivory originated (blue circles). Analyses of ivory confiscated in the Philippines (left) and in Singapore (right) indicated that the poaching occurred primarily in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, respectively.Elephants travel in matriarchal herds, and DNA markers also run in families, allowing the researchers to determine the relatedness of different tusks, be they from parents, offspring, siblings or half-siblings. When they find tusks from the same elephant or clan in different shipments with a common port, it suggests that the shipments were sent from the same criminal network — which is useful information for law enforcement officials.
This kind of information came in handy during a recent international investigation, called Operation Kuluna, led by Hammer and colleagues at Homeland Security Investigations. It started with a sting: Undercover US investigators purchased African ivory that was advertised online. In 2020, the team spent $14,500 on 49 pounds of elephant ivory that was cut up, painted black, mixed with ebony and shipped to the United States with the label “wood.” The following year, the investigators purchased about five pounds of rhino horn for $18,000. The undercover buyers then expressed interest in lots more inventory, including additional ivory, rhino horns and pangolin scales.
The promise of such a huge score lured two sellers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to come to the United States, expecting to seal the $3.5 million deal. Instead, they were arrested near Seattle and eventually sentenced for their crimes. But the pair were not working alone: Operations like these are complex, says Hammer, “and behind complex conspiracies come money, organizers.” And so the investigators took advantage of elephant genetic and clan data which helped to link the tusks to other seizures. It was like playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” says Hammer.
Shortly after the US arrests, Hammer’s counterparts in Africa raided warehouses in the DRC to seize more than 2,000 pounds of ivory and 75 pounds of pangolin scales, worth more than $1 million.
Two photos show pieces of elephant tusks from a warehouse. On the left is a large pile of ivory and on the right are three pieces on a scale.
Following arrests of smugglers in Washington state, law enforcement officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo raided warehouses, recovering elephant ivory, rhinoceros horns and pangolin scales.Despite these successes, wildlife forensics remains a small field: The Society for Wildlife Forensic Science has fewer than 200 members in more than 20 countries. And while DNA analysis is powerful, the ability to identify species or individuals is only as good as the genetic databases researchers can compare their samples to. In addition, many samples contain degraded DNA that simply can’t be analyzed — at least, not yet.
Today, in fact, a substantial portion of wildlife trade crimes may go unprosecuted because researchers don’t know what they’re looking at. The situation leaves scientists stymied by that very basic question: “What is this?”
For example, forensic scientists can be flummoxed by animal parts that have been heavily processed. Cooked meat is generally traceable; leather is not. “We have literally never been able to get a DNA sequence out of a tanned product,” says Harper, who wrote about the forensics of poaching in the 2023 Annual Review of Animal Biosciences. In time, that may change: Several researchers are working to improve identification of degraded samples. They might work out ways to do so based on the proteins therein, says Spicer, since these are more resistant than DNA is to destruction by heat or chemistry.
Success, stresses Spicer, will require the cooperation of wildlife forensic scientists around the world. “Anywhere that somebody can get a profit or exploit an animal, they’re going to do it — it happens in every single country,” she says. “And so it’s really essential that we all work together.”
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Read More »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.
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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.”
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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.”
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