\tWith their help, researchers can now track wild animals through dense forests and monitor whales in vast oceans. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature estimated that up to five living species on earth become extinct every day, making it vital that universities develop new technologies to capture the data that can persuade those in power to act, theguardian.com wrote.<\/p>\n
\tThe British International Education Association and the Born Free Foundation hosted a conference in January to highlight the importance of technological solutions in protecting vulnerable species and ecosystems. Speakers underlined how technology can help conservation efforts: Fixed-wing drones can land on water and circle high above the Indian Ocean to spot whales, rays and illegal fishing, while artificial intelligence-enabled infrared cameras are able to identify members of an individual species or human poachers, even through thick environmental cover.<\/p>\n
\tAccording to Claudio Sillero, professor of conservation biology at Oxford University and Born Free\u2019s chief scientist, technology is changing the way conservation research is done \u2014 but it\u2019s in an evolutionary way. As the technology gets better, cheaper and smaller, researchers get better at doing what they were already doing. For example, remote sensing used to be a very technical tool but is now ubiquitous, and everyone uses geographic information system (GIS) and global positioning system (GPS) for surveying.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWe started with handheld gadgets in the 1960s and now we are using satellites,\u201d Sillero says.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWith sensors and probes we can go out into the field and measure virtually everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\u201cUniversities are trying to keep up and provide facilities and courses but the drive comes from entrepreneurial students, individual research projects or small teams that embrace technology and pick up new stuff,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\tThe emergence of affordable, recreational and commercial drones has been a \u2018revelation\u2019, said Melissa Schiele, a researcher with the Zoological Society of London.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cInnovative methodologies are being explored and the applications are being tried and tested around the world, on a plethora of species and in all environments. It\u2019s seriously exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tBut researchers are still learning how to gather new types of imagery and pull new data sets from them.<\/p>\n
\tEqually, teaching in university conservation and ecology courses differs. Some teach drone surveying methods in depth while others don\u2019t even mention them.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThe fact is, using drones in itself is quite a leap into the interdisciplinary \u2018unknown\u2019 of engineering and piloting, and potentially an area where lecturers may not feel confident to teach yet,\u201d Schiele said.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cEcologists are in the early days of officially integrating this into the curriculum and it is gaining traction. It has to.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tSerge Wich, professor in primate biology in Liverpool John Moores University\u2019s School of Natural Sciences, agreed: Students are taught about well-established technologies such as camera traps and automatic acoustic recorders, but drones are often missing from university teaching.<\/p>\n
\tAs a result, drone use among researchers is still fairly limited and focused on getting photos, he said.<\/p>\n
\tWich\u2019s eclectic team of researchers used techniques from astronomy and machine-learning to develop a fully automated drone technology system that tracks and monitors the health of endangered animals around the globe. It\u2019s designed to be cheap, robust and simple to use, so that local communities in developing countries can operate it independently without any technical background.<\/p>\n
\tThermal cameras allow detection of animals in the dark, which can then be classified automatically with imaging technologies used in astronomy, meaning researchers have the potential to monitor endangered animals more effectively than ever before.<\/p>\n
\tYet it\u2019s not more widely used because few researchers have the skills to use this type of technology. In biology, where many people are starting to use drones, few can code an algorithm specifically for their conservation or research problem, Wich said.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThere\u2019s a lot that needs to be done to bridge those two worlds and to make the AI more user-friendly so that people who can\u2019t code can still use the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe solutions are more support from tech companies, better teaching in universities to help students overcome their fears of coding, and finding ways to link technologies together in an internet-of-things concept where all the different sensors, including GPS, drones, cameras and sensors, work together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With their help, researchers can now track wild animals through dense forests and monitor whales in vast oceans. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature estimated that up to five living species on earth become extinct every day, making it vital that universities develop new technologies to capture the data that can persuade those in power to act, theguardian.com wrote.<\/p>\n
\tThe British International Education Association and the Born Free Foundation hosted a conference in January to highlight the importance of technological solutions in protecting vulnerable species and ecosystems. Speakers underlined how technology can help conservation efforts: Fixed-wing drones can land on water and circle high above the Indian Ocean to spot whales, rays and illegal fishing, while artificial intelligence-enabled infrared cameras are able to identify members of an individual species or human poachers, even through thick environmental cover.<\/p>\n
\tAccording to Claudio Sillero, professor of conservation biology at..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mdpair.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}