Yusuf, a keeper at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (which partners with the NRT) in northern Kenya sleeping among orphaned baby rhinos (Credit: Ami Vitale/Alamy)
Excerpt:
While NRT conservancies have made significant headway with poachers, it’s not enough. So they’re adding a new strategy: using cutting-edge technologies to stop poaching and keep both people and animals safe – ultimately boosting everyone’s quality of life.
The pay offs have been significant and are only growing. In 2016, NRT member conservancies brought in commercial income of over $600,000 (£461,000), mostly from tourism. “Wildlife is the catalyst that launched this, but there is also extraordinarily diverse habitat and deep, great culture,” says Ian Craig, who originally conceived of the NRT and now serves as its director of conservation. “With that, you’ve got a tourist product that drives economy and jobs, and brings government support because tourists need security.”
Around 10,000 people directly benefit from schools, renewable energy projects, water infrastructure and micro-finance initiatives, and more still enjoy other perks, including enhanced security, community phones in areas lacking cell service, new roads and a livestock purchasing programme that spares herders the long trip from field to market. Over 1,000 people are also employed by the NRT or work in related tourism jobs, including nearly 800 rangers, some of whom were former poachers.
To take protection to the next level, conservation managers have partnered with Vulcan, a Seattle-based philanthropic company created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, to create the ultimate programme for managing wild areas.
The Domain Awareness System (DAS), as it is called, is their software solution. It compiles into one neat map all the data about a given area – locations of elephants, rangers and vehicles, sites of past poaching incursions, gunshot detections, weather and more. The end result enables informed decision-making taken to an elite military level previously unimaginable to conservationists.
“Unless we have one integrated visualisation and alerting platform, then we’ll have drones, sensors, cameras and all sorts of fancy things out collecting data, but it’ll all be a big mess,” says Ted Schmitt, Vulcan’s lead program manager for DAS. “Essentially, we’ve created a command and control solution for conservation.”
