topic: Surveillance

topic: Surveillance

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Shrinking civil space and persistent logging: 2023 in review in Southeast Asia
- Home to the third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest and some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Southeast Asia has seen conservation wins and losses over the course of 2023.
- The year was characterized by a rising trend of repression against environmental and Indigenous defenders that cast a shadow of fear over the work of activists in many parts of the region.
- Logging pressure in remaining tracts of forest remained intense, and an El Niño climate pattern brought regional haze crises generated by forest fires and agricultural burning returned.
- But some progress was made on several fronts: Most notably, increasing understanding of the benefits and methods of ecosystem restoration underpinned local, national and regional efforts to bring back forests, mangroves and other crucial sanctuaries of biodiversity.

‘The police are watching’: In Mekong countries, eco defenders face rising risks
- Activists, journalists, environmental lawyers and others who raise attention for environmental issues in the Mekong region say they feel threatened by authoritarian governments.
- Environment defenders say they feel under surveillance and at risk both in their home countries and abroad.
- The risks they face include violence and arrests, as well as state-backed harassment such as asset freezes and smear campaigns.

Biosurveillance of markets and legal wildlife trade needed to curb pandemic risk: Experts
- Almost 90% of the 180 recognized RNA viruses that can harm humans are zoonotic in origin. But disease biosurveillance of the world’s wildlife markets and legal trade is largely absent, putting humanity at significant risk.
- The world needs a decentralized disease biosurveillance system, experts say, that would allow public health professionals and wildlife scientists in remote areas to test for pathogens year-round, at source, with modern mobile technologies in order to help facilitate a rapid response to emerging zoonotic disease outbreaks.
- Though conservation advocates have long argued for an end to the illegal wildlife trade (which does pose zoonotic disease risk), but the legal trade poses a much greater threat to human health, say experts.
- Governments around the world are calling for the World Health Organization to create a pandemic treaty. Wildlife groups are pushing for such an agreement to include greater at-source protections to prevent zoonotic spillover.

‘No place to hide’ for illegal fishing fleets as surveillance satellites prepare for lift-off
- A low-cost satellite revolution is paving the way for real-time monitoring of fishing vessels using synthetic-aperture radar (SAR).
- SAR allows researchers to monitor ‘dark vessels’ that aren’t transmitting Automatic Identification Signals (AIS) location data.
- Disabling or manipulating AIS transmitters is a tactic commonly used by vessels engaged in illegal fishing activity.

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.

Social media, e-commerce sites facilitate illegal orchid trade
- Wild orchids are collected for their beauty and are also used in traditional foods and medicines. This demand has left the plants prone to illegal trafficking.
- Despite having some of the best legal protections afforded to plants, wild orchids remain under immense threat globally for the illegal trade.
- While many orchids sold online are grown in greenhouses and have proper documentation, wild orchid traffickers are increasingly poaching the plants from protected forests, posing grave risks to the impacted species.
- There is often an overlap between legal and illegal online orchid sales, sometimes involving the same platforms, buyers and sellers, and little enforcement to prevent illegal transactions.

Peru’s Brazil nut harvesters learn to monitor forests with drones
- Brazil nut and ecotourism concessions in the Amazon maintain intact rainforest, but deforestation by illegal loggers, miners, and agriculturalists threaten the integrity of these lands and the Brazil nut industry.
- The Peruvian NGO Conservación Amazónica – ACCA is training concessionaires and forestry officials in southeastern Peru to fly drones and monitor the properties they manage using drone-based cameras.
- The resulting high-resolution aerial images enable concessionaires to detect and quantify deforestation within their Brazil nut, ecotourism, and other forest concessions and support their claims of illegal activity to the authorities.

‘Better and better’: Thermal cameras turn up the heat on poachers
- The annual Serengeti-Maasai Mara wildebeest migration attracts not just tourists, but also bushmeat poachers, who kill between 40,000 and 100,000 animals along the way.
- In 2016, the Mara Conservancy began using FLIR thermal cameras, which detect heat instead of light, to find and capture poachers at night, when they are most active.
- Thermal imaging, together with a motivated team using high-quality digital radios, has led to the capture of over 100 people and left poachers at a loss as to how they’re being detected.

New study provides blueprint to translate satellite data into conservation action
- A new paper offers a protocol to help conservation practitioners integrate forest-monitoring technology with policy to reduce illegal deforestation.
- Public and private entities can more easily access the latest satellite-based remote-sensing technology to rapidly detect new deforestation, prioritize areas for action, identify the causes, and get the information to policymakers without delay.
- The study calls for increased use of satellite technology to improve the monitoring, understanding and communication of deforestation events, as well as increase engagement between government institutions and civil society.

This tiny camera aims to catch poachers — before they kill
- A Tanzanian game reserve has successfully tested the TrailGuard cryptic camera and 24/7 electronic surveillance system to detect and capture wildlife poachers and their snares.
- The system uses image recognition algorithms and real-time image transmission to help the often limited patrolling staff of many protected areas identify and respond to potential poachers along trails before they kill their target animals.
- Despite some difficulties with installation and the algorithms, the TrailGuard units in Tanzania have photographed 40 reserve intruders, including poachers or trespassers, resulting in the arrests of 13 suspects.
- The designers are currently developing a new, lower-cost version of the system to be built later this year that they expect will address the difficulties and be more widely available.

Online network seeks to boost international collaboration against wildlife trafficking in Central Africa
- The Africa-TWIX (Trade in Wildlife Information eXchange) platform facilitates collaboration to help Central African enforcement agencies implement wildlife trade laws and treaties.
- The platform’s secure mailing list and database allow enforcement officials from five countries to share materials and data that enhance cross-border collaboration.
- The sharing of experiences, data and best practices among police, inspectors, prosecutors, judges, and customs officials is expected to help enhance their respective abilities to better fight wildlife crime.

You don’t need a bigger boat: AI buoys safeguard swimmers and sharks
- A new tech-driven device may help reduce harmful interactions with sharks and improve people’s tolerance of one of the ocean’s top predators.
- The system, called Clever Buoy, combines sonar to detect a large object in the water, artificial intelligence to determine that the object is a shark close enough to threaten beachgoers, and automated SMS alerts to lifeguards that enable them to take action.
- Local governments have deployed the system at popular beaches and surfing sites to test its capacity to protect swimmers and surfers without harming marine wildlife.

Radar returns to remote sensing through free, near-real-time global imagery
- The European Space Agency’s launch of the Sentinel-1 satellite has made 20-meter resolution radar imagery of the whole planet freely available.
- The “all-weather, day-and-night supply of imagery of Earth’s surface” complements standard optical satellite imagery in detecting forest loss, even under heavy cloud cover.
- The Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) demonstrates the benefits of analyzing free radar imagery to accurately quantify wet season loss of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon.

Powering cameras and empowering people
- Keeping equipment running in harsh field conditions can challenge any tech project, as can working successfully with volunteers.
- Mongabay-Wildtech spoke with leaders of one project, wpsWatch, that deploys connected camera traps to monitor wildlife and people in reserves and employs volunteers to monitor image feeds from afar.
- Powering equipment for field surveillance and “making it part of everyone’s day” enable the rapid image detection, communication, and response by ground patrols needed to successfully apprehend wildlife poachers using cameras and other sensors.

Crowdsourcing the fight against poaching, with the help of remote cameras
- A U.S. non-profit and a cadre of volunteers have teamed up with reserves in South Africa and Indonesia to combat wildlife poaching through a series of connected camera traps.
- The group’s monitoring system, wpsWatch, can transmit visual, infrared, and thermal camera images as well as data from radar, motion detectors, and other field devices.
- The volunteers monitor image feeds while rangers sleep and have become an effective part of the team, which has detected roughly 180 intrusions into the reserves, including rhino and bushmeat poachers.

Going viral: How advancements in Ebola disease detection in wild apes can help to prevent dangerous outbreaks
- Research using a non-invasive method of detecting Ebola virus antibodies from wild ape dung has shown that non-human great apes can survive the disease.
- Early detection and disease monitoring in wildlife populations can prevent the transmission of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola from being transmitted to humans.
- A more comprehensive assessment of health threats to wild great apes can help to determine whether the Ebola virus is of primary concern in a given gorilla or chimpanzee population.

KEDR: Watching over the cedar forests of the Russian Far East
- KEDR uses an algorithm to automatically analyze real-time satellite images for various canopy changes to provide forest managers precise logging intelligence so they can quickly counteract violations.
- The technology could help conserve the critically endangered Amur tiger and leopard that inhabit these forests.
- KEDR is now being implemented in two provinces and has been recommended for use throughout the country. The tool will continue to be developed with technological upgrades, high-precision satellite imagery, new algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Beyond data collection — the social and political effects of environmental sensor proliferation
- Sensors are increasingly collecting data everywhere, changing how we relate to and manage the environment.
- These data answer researchers’ scientific questions but can also generate social, cultural and political effects, reinforcing the need for more data.
- In a new book, “Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet,” Dr. Jennifer Gabrys suggests that the future of environmental management is a question of how and whether to “program” the Earth.

EGI: Filling in the gaps in law enforcement for the online wildlife trade
- Enforcement Gaps Interface (EGI) uses a computational algorithm to mine hundreds of commercial sites for ads potentially containing illegal wildlife and wildlife products.
- EGI aims to help law enforcement agencies, retailers and nongovernmental organizations reduce and ultimately eliminate rampant online wildlife trafficking.
- EGI’s creators are further developing it to incorporate more languages and image recognition into its searches.

e-Eye of the tiger: Complex surveillance system extends watch over India’s wildlife sanctuaries
- e-Eye is a large-scale intelligent technology capable of 24/7 all-weather, live-feed wildlife surveillance in vulnerable areas and sanctuary perimeters, collecting and interpreting wildlife crime data to alert law enforcement before violations occur.
- The anti-poaching apparatus secures protected areas by helping monitor hard-to-access regions, detect intruders, manage patrols and keep rangers accountable. It also helps reserve managers study wildlife.
- Its developers and users hope to expand it to other domestic and international reserves to protect more tigers and other threatened species, such as elephants.

Undercover robots: On a mission to stop poaching
- North American wildlife agencies have been using motorized remote-controlled taxidermied poaching target decoys to catch unlawful hunters for over two decades.
- The decoys help enforcement agencies safely witness poaching firsthand and apprehend hundreds of unauthorized hunters, acquire hefty enforcement fines, deter potential violators and save real animals’ lives.
- Robots of different species with new movements are constantly in the making.

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