Hello Martina, I just messaged you! Hope to speak soon! :)

Hi, I'm really interested in your project. If you're open to it, I’d be happy to build and send you a couple of data logger units — free of charge — to help monitor temperature, humidity, pressure, and possibly hive weight using a load cell. I’m also considering adding a simple bee traffic sensor to track how often bees enter and leave the hive. This could help reveal patterns related to foraging behavior or colony stress. 

 It would also be an interesting use case for using LoRaWAN to send node data to a central gateway. The data could be exported in line protocol format so you can easily import it into InfluxDB or another dashboarding tool if you'd like to visualize it.

 I’m quite busy with other projects, but I’d be happy to throw something together to get you started, and I’ll include the source code in case you'd like to modify or expand it in the future. Let me know if this sounds helpful — I'd love to support your work.

 Best regards, Travis

Hi, likely already a bit late to make impact, but here's what we have seen work very well:

• UAV's equipped with thermal vision
• Fence alarms
• 'Scarecrows' mimicking ranger activities with a pivoting flashlight (very effective and cheap)

We are a NGO developing those cheap, but efficient methods and partnering with a game reserve. Currently looking into scale up to make the tech available to other reserves.
I haven't been involved as a founder, but a partnership with the reserve was always required.
The goals a shortly put as, preventing wildlife crime BEFORE it happens. So mostly any kind of poaching. Now as we are growing, looking also into monitoring tasks such as wildlife count/VHF tracking etc.

You can also check out WWF's newly launched C2C: Conflict to Coexistence approach. It provides a framework and methodology for developing tailor-made human-wildlife conflict (HWC) management strategy based on the local cultural, environmental and social context.

Read "" on

There are two great articles about the issue of bird poaching in the Mediterranean and its serious threat to Palaearctic bird populations by Jonathan Franzen.

A 2010 article in the New Yorker,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/26/emptying-the-skies

and a 2013 National Geographic feature,

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2013/07/songbird-migration/

I wrote a 2017 blog post for National Geographic about the topic of bird poaching in Cyprus,

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2017/11/21/can-anti-poaching-activism-save-25-million-birds-a-year/

Regards,

Jason

Not a book, but a very real documentary:
Stroop - Journey into the Rhino Horn War

Hola Vanessa,

Aside from whats already commented, did you find any interesting new leads on this? I'm also interested in ways ecoacoustic tech can be used against wildlife crime, both as in research development, but even more so in its short or long-term applications and how it can be truly adopted in source countries.
It seems to me research or work in this is still limited but there's potential! I'd love to stay in touch about it :)

 Is thisvfunding grant an opportunity? https://www.dronedeploy.com/blog/expand-your-impact-with-a-grant-from-dronedeploy

Hi David, this is an incredible project. Would you be interested in sharing more of your experience with AI and wildlife conservation with my students? They are currently researching this, and would greatly benefit from speaking with a professional in the field. Thank you for considering!

Hats off to your team for this absolute game-changing technology! 

We rescue stray and wild animals in Taiwan, and the bulk of our work is saving animals maimed by wire snares and gin traps. We've become better at finding the devices, but still not good at all. There's simply too much difficult terrain to cover and we only have eyeballs and hiking sticks to find them. We know roughly where they are because the maimed stray dogs will eventually find their way onto a road and be reported to us. Then we close one of them, set up a trail camera, get the evidence of the poacher in the act of re-setting it, and get him prosecuted and shut down. But we need to be able to scale this greatly.

I've been using a thermal-imaging drone to locate stricken animals and am now considering buying another drone more suited to finding traps and snares. Some newer drones are able to navigate through forest without crashing into thin branches, so I've been looking into equipping one with LiDAR to see if that can detect the devices. But then I came across your YouTube channel and then this post about using airborne synthetic radar, and I'm incredibly excited to see where you might take this incredible technology.

How can we get our hands on the SAR you're using? It's 3 kg, right? I'm wondering if I could fit it to a suitable drone. If it works above forest canopy to detect traps and snares on the forest floor, then I can use a load-carrying drone instead of a light obstacle-avoidance drone.

If you made the SAR yourselves, then maybe think about crowdfunding for your project. I'd happily pledge funds if it meant I could get my hands on the kind of equipment you're using.

I can't tell you how happy I am thinking about all the animals' lives you'll save with this. Don't just remove the snares—gather evidence and put the poachers out of business too!

Hi all,

maybe it helps 😉 My free manual 'Drones in Biomonitoring' - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8077113 can help to get (more) knowledge how to proceed easily and successfully 😉 It covers topics from buy to fly and data processing.

📖 The manual was developed to help authorities, landscape conservation / maintenance or nature conservation associations etc. in nature conservation to manage their growing monitoring tasks more effectively and cost-efficiently.
🛸 The use of drones can contribute in many ways to increasing the effectiveness of monitoring, reducing costs and minimizing disturbance - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steffen-Doering.

Best regards!
Steffen