Researchers in Kenya and South Africa are using cellphone technology to gather information on elephants, cheetahs, leopards and other animals.
The relatively cheap tracking device includes a no-frills cellphone that is put in a weatherproof case with a GPS receiver, memory card and software to operate the system. The unit, placed on a collar, is then tied around the neck of a wild animal.
As the animals roam, ”the GPS receives coordinates, downloads them onto the memory chip — and then every hour, the phone wakes up and sends a [short text message] of the last hour’s coordinates to a central server,” said Michael Joseph of Safaricom, Kenya’s leading service provider, which is involved in an elephant-tracking project.
Then the phone goes to sleep again, preserving battery power. The tagged animals can also be tracked on the internet by software that maps their location using data sent by text messaging, said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Kenya’s longest-running pachyderm research project, Save the Elephants.
The technology has enabled South Africa’s researchers to save up to 60% in costs for tracking wildlife, said Professor Wouter van Hoven of the University of Pretoria’s Center for Wildlife Management.
”The system is much more user friendly because you don’t have to walk around the bush searching for the animals. I have sat around in Europe and was able to monitor animals in the mountains using a cellphone that had access to the internet,” he said.
Previously, researchers tracking tagged wildlife had to locate the targeted animals by aircraft or by car and get close to them before they could download information through VHF transmitters.
”This means if they could find the animal, they could do this maybe once a month — at high cost, of course,” Douglas-Hamilton said.
The new system, however, has its limitations, mainly battery life and cellphone network coverage.
”If it is on a wild animal, you have to make the battery last at least a year or maybe even more — because in order to change the battery, you have to dart the animal [with tranquilisers], which is very stressful for the animal,” said Joseph.
The company had to boost the capacity of cell sites covering some of Kenya’s remote areas to enable researchers to effectively monitor the movements of elephants in wildlife reserves and across corridors linking these sanctuaries. This has benefited nearby villagers who were previously outside network coverage.
The information collected has offered new insight into the habits of the largest land animals.
”The main surprise is elephants have these very narrow corridors down which they move at high speed at night,” said Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants.
”It looks as if elephants plan ahead. Sometimes before they make one of these big moves, they go out in little reconnaissance and come back to the core group — and then suddenly they would streak across.” – Sapa-AP