topic: GPS

topic: GPS

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Taking up the cause of red pandas: Q&A with actor and activist Dayahang Rai
- Dayahang Rai, a popular Nepali actor, shares his passion and challenges for red panda conservation, as an ambassador for the Red Panda Network, an NGO working to save the endangered animal in Nepal.
- Rai says he’s been inspired by nature since childhood, and that working on red panda conservation is his way of giving back to nature by reaching out to a wide audience to convey the urgency of the situation.
- He adds that while he has limited scientific knowledge of the species, he understands that red pandas are at risk of disappearing due to human activity, such as illegal hunting for their pelts, and unplanned road construction through their habitats.
- In an interview with Mongabay ahead of International Red Panda Day, Rai talks about prospective avenues for getting the conservation message out, and his plans to visit red panda habitat areas soon to see them in the wild.

Roads, human activity take a toll on red pandas: Q&A with researcher Damber Bista
- Damber Bista is a Nepali conservation scientist studying the country’s population of red pandas, an endangered species.
- He says there needs to be much more work done to protect the species, given that 70% of their habitat falls outside of protected areas.
- In an interview with Mongabay, Bista talks about the added stress that habitat fragmentation is putting on juvenile red pandas, the need for landscape-level conservation measures, and the importance of long-term studies.

For tigers in Nepal, highways are a giant roadblock best avoided
- A new study indicates that the presence of roads, and vehicle traffic, in tiger habitats could take a toll on the big cats’ behavior and long-term fitness and survival.
- A tiger fitted with a GPS collar in Nepal’s Parsa National Park was found to avoid crossing roads by day, but to cross more often during the country’s 2021 COVID-19 lockdown.
- This suggests the animals can adapt quickly when traffic volume eases, pointing to measures that can be taken to mitigate road impacts not just on tigers, but on wildlife in general.
- Researchers say the findings should give planners in Nepal something to consider as they look to double the number of lanes on the East-West Highway that runs through both Parsa and Bardiya national parks.

Collaboration is key to scaling conservation technologies (commentary)
- To tackle conservation challenges, the sector has embraced numerous technologies like GPS, radio telemetry, satellite imagery, camera traps, and software to process and analyze data.
- A new op-ed argues that such tech must be built with the end-user in mind: their voices must be considered to ensure the solutions reflect the real needs on the ground.
- Investors, NGOs, and conservationists should also demand that conservation technology is developed in the field and is both scalable and coalition-based: collaborations like Wildlife Insights and SMART are prime examples.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Whale zone ahead: A cetacean speed trap tags ships going over the limit
- North Atlantic right whales, a critically endangered species with fewer than 366 remaining individuals, face two main threats: fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes.
- Many ships do not obey voluntary or mandatory speed restrictions in areas where North Atlantic right whales are present, raising the risk of fatal collisions.
- A new tool called Ship Speed Watch provides information on vessels that are not obeying speed restrictions.
- Conservationists say they hope it will help build awareness and strengthen regulations surrounding ship speeds.

Protected areas best conserve mammalian diversity when connected with corridors, biologged weasels show
- For protected area (PA) networks to be an effective conservation tool, they should be well-connected to allow species movement through unprotected landscapes, but questions remain on what configuration of natural features can best facilitate animal movement.
- A recent study compared three theories of animal movement (structurally intact corridors, least-cost paths, and stepping stones) by analyzing the fine-scale movements of GPS-tagged fishers, a member of the weasel family. They found the tagged fishers consistently moved along structurally intact, natural corridors across a PA network.
- With the Aichi 2020 Biodiversity Targets in mind, the authors highlight that simply increasing the number of protected areas alone may not achieve the objectives of the protected area network amidst an increasingly fragmented landscape; the conservation of natural corridors between PAs may be equally important, something for future planners to consider.

Machine learning tool helps prioritize plants for conservation
- In a first global plant conservation assessment, a multi-institutional research team used the power of open-access databases and machine learning to predict the conservation status of more than 150,000 plants.
- They paired geographic, environmental, climatic, and morphological trait information of plant species of known risk of extinction from the IUCN Red List with information on plants of unknown risk in a machine learning model. The model calculated the likelihood that a given unassessed plant species was actually at risk of extinction and identified the variables that best predicted conservation risk.
- More than 15,000 of the species–roughly 10 percent of the total assessed by the team—had characteristics similar to those already categorized as at least near-threatened by IUCN and thus at a high likelihood of extinction.
- The protocol could provide a first cut in identifying unassessed species likely at risk of extinction and suggest how to allocate scarce conservation resources.

10 ways conservation tech shifted into auto in 2018
- Conservation scientists are increasingly automating their research and monitoring work, to make their analyses faster and more consistent; moreover, machine learning algorithms and neural networks constantly improve as they process additional information.
- Pattern recognition detects species by their appearance or calls; quantifies changes in vegetation from satellite images; tracks movements by fishing ships on the high seas.
- Automating even part of the analysis process, such as eliminating images with no animals, substantially reduces processing time and cost.
- Automated recognition of target objects requires a reference database: the species and objects used to create the algorithm determine the universe of species and objects the system will then be able to identify.

Satellite trackers help fight vultures’ extinction in southern Africa
- Vultures in southern Africa are being killed, mainly by eating carcasses poisoned by farmers, and in collisions with power lines and wind turbines.
- Concerned about population declines, the Maloti-Drakensberg Vulture Project began tracking vulture movements with small GPS transmitters, only to find them dying at a rapid rate.
- The three-dimensional tracking data showing the overlap between vulture breeding and roosting areas resulted in cancellation of a pair of proposed wind farms in Lesotho and a call for more ecologically informed siting of needed renewable energy infrastructure.

For the birds: Innovations enable tracking of even small flying animals
- Advances in satellite communications have revolutionized wildlife telemetry, yet tracking the movements of small animals, especially ones that fly, and marine species, which rarely break the ocean’s surface, has remained a challenge.
- In a November 20th virtual meetup on next-generation wildlife tracking, three speakers introduced developments that have broadened telemetry’s reach to new species and new types of data being collected.
- Recent innovations — including the ICARUS tracking system, hybridization of communications platforms, and miniaturization of sensors — are producing tiny solar-powered tracking tags and tags carrying various environmental sensors that function within private networks flexible enough to use the most efficient of several communications technologies available at a given site.

The iNaturalist species data sharing platform reaches one million users
- The iNaturalist species data-sharing platform reached a milestone earlier this month with its one millionth observer.
- The 10-year-old platform and mobile app use several smartphone technologies, crowd-sourced data, and artificial intelligence to help observers identify the species of plants and animals they see.
- Co-founder Scott Loarie highlighted the rapid progress in computer vision technology as a surprisingly helpful technology that complements crowdsourcing to speed the image identification process for a large number of photos, though it has also introduced other concerns, including how to maintain high data quality.

Tiny tags and a broad research network help track small animal movements
- Despite great advances in radio-telemetry technology, tracking small animals still presents challenges due to the weight of tracking equipment.
- The Motus Wildlife Tracking System uses nano-tags as light as 0.2 grams to track even small birds and insects.
- Based on a collaborative deployment of automated telemetry receivers, Motus can track animals over a broad geographical region to help answer fundamental questions about animal movements, leading to insights that can help protect migratory species as they traverse the landscape.

Tagging and tracking the Tour de Turtles
- The Sea Turtle Conservancy’s Tour de Turtles kicked off last month, tagging and tracking 17 sea turtles during a marathon migration.
- Turtles wear small transmitters during the annual event as they travel thousands of miles to from their nesting beaches to feeding grounds.
- Data collected from satellite telemetry help scientists gain a clearer understanding of how four species of turtles behave at sea, furthering efforts to protect endangered species.

Mongabay discusses technology’s role in conservation at Seattle event [VIDEO]
- A team from Mongabay discussed new applications of technology for conservation with representatives of Seattle Audubon and Acate Amazon Conservation during an event at Seattle Central College, Washington.
- In this video recording, the panelists discuss topics ranging from bioacoustics to remote sensing and AI and answer questions from the audience.

Borneo’s elephants prefer degraded forests, a new study finds
- New research has found that Bornean elephants most often use degraded forests with canopy heights topping out at around 13 meters (43 feet).
- Less than 25 percent of the state’s protected intact forests, which include primary forests, are suitable for elephants, the authors concluded.
- The team suggests that maintaining suitable elephant habitat in Malaysian Borneo will require the protection of relatively small patches of degraded forests that elephants favor.

Counting tigers on smartphones
- India’s 2018 national tiger estimation will use an Android-based mobile application to streamline collection of field data on tigers and prey, add photos and GPS coordinates, record poaching and human-wildlife conflict, and reduce error in data entry.
- The M-STrIPES app uploads field data automatically to a remote central server for rapid analysis or stores the data on the user’s mobile phone until internet access is available.
- The app has been tested successfully in a few tiger reserves, made more user friendly, and is now being rolled out on a national scale, but can it help resolve discrepancies in survey results?

Open-source species location data supports global biodiversity analyses
- The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is now the largest biodiversity database in the world with records of hundreds of millions of occurrences of over 1.7 million species, ranging from bacteria to blue whales.
- Institutions from over 50 countries contribute species occurrence and related data to the open-access platform, which make possible regional or global-scale analyses of data ranging from global distributions to invasive species and climate change impacts.
- As GBIF and other collaborative, open-source data bases continue to expand and mature, so will their usefulness to a greater range of scientific studies.

Low-tech challenges to high-tech forest monitoring: lessons from Ugandan parks
- Remote sensing technology can provide useful intelligence to park managers but must be combined with an understanding of its limitations, as well as the tools and training needed for its use.
- An assessment by park rangers in Uganda of satellite image-based deforestation alerts found that the alert locations at 30 m x 30 m resolution were sufficiently accurate to support reserve management.
- The near real-time alerts of likely deforestation could make forest patrols more efficient and effective, but rangers must still have proper training, incentives, and resources to properly integrate alerts into their regular functions.

Animated animals: can games engage an audience with a conservation message?
- Video games that incorporate new data visualization technologies offer an alternative channel to communicate the ecology and the plight of wildlife to an otherwise untapped audience.
- An online game called Safari Central will combine real tracking data from animals in the wild with augmented reality, creating virtual avatars of these namesakes.
- Though still unproven, games also offer an unconventional business model to support wildlife conservation programs through small in-game purchases by a potentially huge audience.

Tuna catch monitoring enters the electronic age
- A new electronic monitoring system is being tested in the western and central Pacific to improve the timeliness and accuracy of tuna catch data and the transparency of tuna supply chains through faster more effective on-board and portside catch monitoring.
- Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing results in overharvesting and an annual loss of US $600 million for the region and is perpetrated primarily by licensed vessels hauling in unreported and unregulated fish stock.
- The Onboard, Observer, and TAILS portside e-Reporting apps are still in the testing phase, but their use is expected to expand across the Pacific.

Story-telling app and website help communities improve their ‘backyards’
- The TIMBY reporting platform applies the wide range of knowledge and experience of journalists, scientists, technologists, designers and security experts.
- Originally developed in Liberia to curb some of the impacts of illegal logging, the design and function of the TIMBY platform has been customized to fit the needs of the people facing conservation issues other locations.
- TIMBY has been used across the globe to address a wide array of issues, including environmental conservation in Chile, women’s health in Kenya, and information dissemination in Liberia.

Creating corridors: researchers use GPS telemetry data to map elephants’ movements
- Elephant corridors in the Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem are threatened by human development, which has fragmented habitat and intensified human-elephant conflict.
- With GPS telemetry data from three bull elephants, researchers mapped the elephants’ habitat use and connectivity from 2006-2008 and compared it to data from 1960 using new analysis techniques.
- The expansion of agriculture and villages decreased corridor connectivity and disrupted elephants’ movements, according to results of a circuit theory model.

Location, location, location goes high-tech: Facts and FAQs about satellite-based wildlife tracking
- Satellite-based tracking tags, including ARGOS and GPS systems, collect and communicate animal locations and in some cases, acceleration and physiological data—straight to your computer, 24/7.
- ARGOS satellites use their relative position and the Doppler shift to estimate a tag’s location, which they relay back to Earth. GPS tags receive position information from multiple satellites and either store it or resend it via another communications network.
- Satellite-based tags weigh more, cost more, and demand more power than VHF radio tags. Nevertheless, they provide automated collection of thousands of point locations of an animal, which helps researchers to more precisely define home ranges, migration routes, and the relationships of these patterns to landscape features.

Field Notes: Finding Jacobo; an Andean cat captivates conservationists
- The Andean cat ranges from remote areas of central Peru to the Patagonian steppe. Perfectly adapted to extreme environments, this small feline is threatened by habitat degradation and hunting, but most of all it suffers from anonymity: it’s hard to save an animal that no one ever sees.
- So few of these endangered cats are scattered across such vast landscapes that even most of their advocates have never seen the species they’re trying to protect. But the conservation efforts that could save this cat could also preserve the wild places where Andean cats live.
- When a male Andean cat was found wandering around a soccer field, Andean Cat Alliance members agreed to forego the extraordinary opportunity to study the animal in captivity, and try instead to return “Jacobo” to the wild.
- Andean Cat Alliance coordinators Rocío Palacios and Lilian Villalba orchestrated the multinational volunteer release effort. Conservationists equipped Jacobo with a GPS collar and hope that tracking his travels will reveal new data about this secretive cat, considered a symbol of the Andes.

Understanding the ghost of the mountain
- Researchers are learning more about the biology, ethology and conservation status of elusive snow leopards, thanks to advances in satellite telemetry, camera traps, fecal genetics and GIS.
- New, albeit disputed, estimates suggest the snow leopard population is greater than previously thought, but the species is under accelerating threat from poaching, overhunting of prey, retaliatory killing by herders, mining, roads and climate change.
- The protection of the snow leopard, its prey and its highland habitat must remain global priorities to ensure this big cat’s long-term conservation.

Bridging the Gap between Land and Space
- The four-day United Nations/Kenya Conference brought more than 250 stakeholders to Nairobi, Kenya to review potential applications of space-based technologies to wildlife management and biodiversity protection.
- The conference was guided by Sustainable Development Goal 15: Life on Land.
- Participating bodies hope this conference will engage cross-sector collaboration in order to holistically approach wildlife management and biodiversity protection.

Light, long-lasting and low-cost: the technology needs of field conservationists and wildlife researchers
- The concurrent challenges of remoteness, extreme temperatures, dust, high rainfall and humidity, dense vegetation and steep terrain all complicate and limit the use of existing and emerging technologies for nature conservation and research.
- Survey responses of front-line conservationists suggest that no single technology will stop either wildlife poaching or human-wildlife conflict.
- Researchers everywhere desire smaller, lighter, longer-lasting, and more affordable devices that better withstand humidity, dust and damage.
- Integrated, automated devices and systems for detecting, monitoring, and providing early warning of movements of people and animals would revolutionize conservation and research work across species, ecosystems, and countries.

First-of-its-kind mapping platform could help protect land held by Indigenous communities
- Beta version of the unique online platform, LandMark, was launched on November 10.
- LandMark makes global data on land held and used by communities and indigenous peoples accessible on a single platform.
- Platform aims to “make clear that community lands are not vacant, idle or available to outsiders,” according to statement.

A bird’s-eye view of forest restoration
- Existing methods for monitoring forest restoration success and habitat quality are costly, time-consuming, or both.
- A new methodology that converts images gathered by drones to 3D “point maps” can achieve accuracy comparable to current techniques, including LiDAR.
- The technique received the September Elsevier Atlas award for “research that could significantly impact people’s lives around the world.”

Sunrise to sunset: documenting warbler migrations with cheap, light geolocator tags
- Geolocator tags have become small enough to be used on tiny birds, such as the prothonotary warbler.
- Researchers now know far more about warbler migration routes, which will facilitate conservation plans for this species.
- An initial warbler study showed that the small birds winter in northern Colombia, where their preferred habitat is currently under threat from human activity.

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