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The war against poaching is not going well. Every year, around 20,000 African elephants are killed for their ivory – a trade driven by strong demand in China and the Far East.
“[Poaching] is getting worse in a lot of places, and it’s getting worse because it’s getting a lot more organised,” says Jonathan Palmer, head of the office of strategic technology at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “A lot of poaching, especially of high value animals like elephants and rhinos is now driven by organised gangs.”
And these gangs are armed. Thanks to the high price of ivory, which, before China outlawed the ivory trade, was worth upwards of £950 per kilo, these criminal organisations can afford to equip poachers with submachine guns and AK47s. The rangers tasked with stopping them often have nothing more than a rifle and a handful of bullets.
According to Palmer, many rangers in sub-Saharan protected areas are woefully under-equipped to defend the vast areas they are tasked with patrolling. On average, an area the size of New York’s central park is patrolled by just two rangers with a single gun between them and a yearly budget of £15. “You’d think the task is close to impossible,” he says.
But Palmer is hoping that even if the poachers can’t be out-gunned, it might be possible to put them under pressure a different way. As part of a group consisting of the Wildlife Conservation Society and eight other agencies, Palmer has developed a software platform that helps park rangers track of their patrols and the activities of poachers in their area. The system, called SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool) is already in use in more than 600 sites across 55 countries. It isn’t sexy and high-tech, but the technology being used is already having a huge impact.
“Prior to SMART there would be a lot of places where the patrolling was just ad hoc,” Palmer says. Some rangers would end up patrolling the same stretch of park every day and often their managers didn’t have much of a handle on where the poachers where. “What SMART does is help the park managers know that they are going to the places of greatest need,” he says.
The software gives rangers an overview of every single one of their patrols.
SMART Partnership
Although its deceptively simple, Palmer says that the system has completely changed how rangers do their jobs. Around the islands of Koh Rong and Koh Rong Samloem, Cambodia’s first large-scale marine protected area, the number of fishing violations already fell by 40 per cent after officials started using the SMART system.
But Palmer wants to make the sharing of conservation data even wider. The latest version of the SMART system allows different sites to share their data with each other, giving conservation officials huge oversight over how well their rangers are doing their jobs.
After a year-long pilot phase, 250 sites across Africa, Asia and Latin America are already using the latest version of this technology. As the rollout continues, he’s hoping that technology like this will help rangers get the edge over poachers in the long run.
Although his organisation is experimenting with remote sensors and satellite-tracking, Palmer says there are no technological shortcuts in the fight against poaching.
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