How is technology being currently used to understand and facilitate human-lion coexistence, and work towards mitigating conflicts?

Jacobo Domingo Gil on Jan 17, 2024 • 2 answer
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I am looking to create a landscape of understanding around which technology solutions exist within this space. From my early research I have found that there are some projects and organisations working on two main fronts: 1) Using advanced technology (AI & ML) for better identification, mapping and understanding of lion populations, mapping and their movement. 2) Creating non-invasive, non-harmful deterrent systems to keep lions, elephants and other wildlife away from local crops and/or livestock. I would like to expand my knowledge further on this: what applications are being developed, who is working on these solutions, etc. Any insights are welcome! You can comment on this post, or reach out to me directly. Thank you! Jacobo

Answers

Hi Jacobo - this is an interesting topic. Another general approach that is sometimes used for elephants and I think also lions is early warning systems. These are generally detection systems triggered by a 'smart fence' or a location point for a GPS-collared animal, that notify local communities (often by SMS) that the animal may be in the area. What they do about that varies, but in principle they can at least be better prepared and more vigilant. You may consider this a type of deterrent system, although there isn't any deterrent built into the system as such, just valuable information that improves the application of existing (often low-tech) deterrents. I'm afraid I don't have details on any specific one but if you do an internet search on "lion conflict early warning" you should see a few.

David Jay on Jan 22, 2024
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Hi Jacobo
Great to see your interest on this. I have background in some monitoring of wildlife movements and technologies used in Kenya where I have worked in wildlife movement for almost 8years. The technology may not be that advanced but we have used several equipment to monitor wildlife. Specifically, I have used collars by African wildlife Tracking https://awt.co.za/product/, and Savanna trackers https://www.savannahtracking.com/, in monitoring lions and elephants. There has been several improvements on these collars, with some equipped with geofencing capabilities to allow detection of lions once they violate the geofence. The managers would receive the text alert on the location of the predator. In some areas deterrents such as lights are connected to the geofence or cattle enclosures and are triggered by the collars on the animals once the animal violates the geofence. All these collars are non-invasive and are either connected to mobile networks or satellites.

I have also been involved in deployment of motion triggered cameras to detect predators in community dominated landscape, this cameras have also been connected to internet to enable quick response (however, this is not so effective especially in areas where internet is a challenge and servers are not so reliable). Some of the photos have been used to train models to identify carnivores individually in ML systems such as Wild ID (https://www.wildid.app/). It has been a while since I used the App and there could be hundreds of other development.

On Machine Learning, there are several other platforms for predicting occupancy, distributions based on both collars and presence of the species such as Maxent, artificial neural networks and support vector machines among others.
I hope this helps, if you need further information let me know.

Chege Amos

Amos Chege on Jan 25, 2024
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