Wednesday marked a milestone in the battle to protect endangered species, when an international team of scientists announced they had successfully created two northern white rhino embryos.
The landmark achievement is a promising step towards pulling the white rhino back from the brink of extinction.
It also highlights how technology is being harnessed to protect wildlife – including efforts beyond the lab in places like South Africa.
More than 760 rhinos are killed annually in South Africa – including 421 slaughtered last year in Kruger National Park.
Rhinos are killed for their horns, which are prized in traditional Asian medicine and command high prices when poachers hawk them on black markets. But international trade in rhino parts is illegal.
At one small, private reserve adjacent to Kruger National Park, rangers were losing hope four years ago after 70 of their rhinos fell prey to poachers.
“It was crisis management,” recalls David Powrie, the warden of the 50,000-hectare reserve. “We had tried everything. We’d even tried dyeing their horns.”
Then high-tech executive Bruce “Doc” Watson, who had vacationed at the reserve since 1999, offered to help bolster the property’s IT defences.
“The reserve was remote, with basic IT infrastructure and access control, manual security processes, and very limited communication,” he told Al Jazeera.
In 2015, Watson, an executive at Global Cisco Alliance, founded Connected Conservation, a joint venture programme forged by Cisco and global IT company Dimension Data.
Working with park officials, Connected Conservation helped design and build a Reserve Area Network (RAN). It was supported by trackers placed on vehicles entering the reserve, sensors installed beneath fences to detect guns and other metal objects, and wi-fi to alert
rangers instantly to potential poachers so they could dispatch a security response.
The digitised security infrastructure also allows staff to scan visitors’ passports and licence plates – and even check their backgrounds against a national database of criminal records.
The technology has been a game-changer in the reserve’s war on poaching.
“In 2016, we’d cut poaching by 96 percent and reduced illegal entry into the reserve by 67 percent,” Watson told Al Jazeera. “Between January 2017 and August 2019, we lost no rhinos.”
In 2018, Connected Conservation expanded into Mozambique, Zambia and Kenya.
But illegal wildlife traders have learned to use technology as well. Two rhinos on the reserve fell prey to poachers in August, underscoring the need to constantly create new solutions to tackle evolving threats against wildlife.
In conservation hotspots across the world, artificial intelligence, drones, and surveillance platforms are among the technologies that have become the latest line of defence against the $23bn global illegal wildlife trade, which claims the lives of 800 rhinos – along with 15,000 elephants
and untold numbers of pangolins, impalas, bushpigs, warthogs and other animals – in Africa every year.
Only 25,000 rhinos, 415 African elephants, and dwindling numbers of other at-risk species survive on the continent in the wild today.
“There is too much to protect, and too few people to protect it, so technology has become essential when addressing the global poaching crisis,” says Rohit Singh, head of the Zero Poaching initiative for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
As conservation groups get smarter about technology, so do the poachers they are battling to stop. Environmentalists say the fear of never being more than one step ahead is tangible in their campaign to save animals hunted for their horns, tusks, pelts, scales or skin – or for capture as exotic pets.
