Esther Githinji
- @EstherGithinji
- | She/Her
As we continue exploring wildlife monitoring challenges across East Africa and the accompanying stellar conservation technologies and tools that have been developed and adopted to promote tracking and monitoring of threatened wildlife (you can read more about this in our article here), we focus our attention to Marine Conservation Technology at Bahari Hai in Kenya's coast.
Samuel Mangi
Read on to see our interview with Samuel Mangi from Bahari Hai as he takes us on a journey of his extraordinary marine conservation tech work.
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Tell us about yourself?
I am a dive expert working with Bahari Hai (an organization in marine conservation) as a Photo-ID coordinator. I have years of experience in monitoring nesting sea turtles and carrying out other turtle related work. My hobbies include swimming. In my childhood, I was a member of the wildlife clubs at school and on weekends would spend time with my friends competing to fish and swim. Today, I use underwater photography as my chosen medium for creative expression, communicating with the world and showing people how I view it.
What Marine Conservation challenge were you confronted with that led to your use of technology?
Sea turtles remain under threat from humans. Such threats include encroachment onto nesting sites, poaching for meat, oil and shell. Other threats include entanglement in illegal fishing gears and encroachment into turtle foraging grounds. These threats compounded with natural predation drive the sea turtle population down.
Understanding turtle population is one of the ways used to address these challenges facing sea turtles, design conservation models that ease the pressure from turtle foraging grounds and improve the health of the marine ecosystem. To help capture the population, understand migration patterns and habitat distribution, Bahari Hai found the need to design a tool to enable capturing of this information.
Could you talk us through a brief summary of your work and the technology you're using?
Photo-ID is a cost-effective non-invasive technique that makes it easy to monitor sea turtles without disturbing them. Bahari Hai employs a 3 tier technology that involves the use of an underwater camera to capture turtle images and a mobile device to capture swimming track and observation data i.e. location, transport type, mandate, objective, comment, employees and the leader, survey date, observer, tide cycle name, tide level state, visibility depth of the sighting, site, type of species, age, length in cm, turtle behavior, image right, image left and top image.
The data is then stored on the cloud. This method identifies individual turtles by comparing their facial scales and has been shown to be more effective than tagging.
What challenges have you faced in this work, either with technology or otherwise?
Sometimes the sea is rough and makes it impossible to snorkel. Poor visibility and jelly fish also creates a hindrance to us in undertaking the activity. One challenge in the development of the tool was having a technology that would collect coordinates underwater or auto populate location field in the app basing on flagging timestamps on a swim track.
Are there lessons from your work so far that other WILDLABS members could apply to their own Marine conservation technology work?
The opportunity with this technology is that it opens a wide door to submerge ourselves to the underwater realities, learn and keep exploring life underwater like the recent instance, where I came across a rare sighting of a whale-shark in Watamu while doing the monitoring.
Underwater monitoring is a field less practiced by most conservation organizations and authorities in the region. It is a simple tool to onboard and very key in monitoring the species status in the marine space. It would be worth for organizations to try the technology out with the desire to improve the health of the marine ecosystem.
What other new technologies or innovations could make your work easier, enhance your results, or allow you to expand or further scale up your work?
Currently capturing of tracks, location and observation data are done independently when out in the sea. A system that integrates all these processes into a single tool would be a huge time saver in the process and improve the experience.
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Samuel's story is a great example of the emergence of East African marine conservation technology adoption to monitor and conserve sea turtles across the Kenyan coast through their Sea Turtle Photo-ID Programme. His story of tech adoption reinforces the importance of sharing such examples from across the biodiverse Global South such as East Africa towards encouraging knowledge sharing and the use of conservation technology towards addressing conservation challenges.
If you'd like to learn more about Bahari Hai visit their website here and read about their Sea Turtle Photo-ID Programme here.
In the meantime, stay tuned on WILDLABS to meet more East African conservation tech adopters advancing wildlife monitoring systems across the region in new and innovative ways, and check out our article here for more information on other wildlife monitoring East African projects powered by conservation tech!
Thanks to Samuel Mangi for talking with us about his work at Bahari Hai and sharing photos with the WILDLABS community!
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