HERE’S HOW AI is helping tackle rhino poaching in South Africa

by Daniel Mpala

South Africa’s Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries in February announced that rhino poaching has continued its decline in the country.

THE DEPARTMENT said 594 rhino were poached in 2019 compared to 769 in 2018. It attributed the decline, among other things, to improved capabilities to react to poaching incidents linked to better situational awareness and deployment of technology.

Although an arsenal of technologies have been used in the fight against rhino poaching in South Africa, it’s worth noting the role artificial intelligence (AI) is playing.

Among those at the forefront of the fight against rhino poaching has been trans-frontier conservation non-profit Peace Parks Foundation.

About two years ago Peace Parks, in collaboration with Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife and working closely with Microsoft installed an AI-powered system comprised of 150 cameras in a number of rhino reserves managed by Emzemvelo in the KwaZulu-Natal province.

When triggered, the camera traps send an email of the captured image to Peace Parks’ proprietary AI solution – SnapCatch – which then makes use of Microsoft Azure functions to identify any people or vehicles in the photo. In instances where people or vehicles are detected – positive detections – the SnapCatch app sends the photo to rangers as an alert with a GPS location, as well as information on the target’s direction of travel.

Doug Gillings, who heads up the Peace Parks’ Combatting Wildlife Crime department, said in February that the solution is “very simple and straightforward” to operate from a field or game reserve perspective.

“You create an account on the SnapCatch app, configure the alert process and then add the email address that it generates to the legacy camera trap,” explained Gillings.

The system is not without its difficulties. He pointed out that due to the remoteness and harshness of the environment in which the solutions are deployed in, maintaining the hardware’s batteries, data management and protecting from damage by wildlife are big challenges.

“Keeping the complexities and customisations server side, has simplified things significantly as the solution is hardware agnostic and very cheap to replace,” said Gillings

The need for AI The more than 150 cameras that make up the system generate more than 28 000 images a month.

Gillings pointed out that sifting through all this data to find poachers, as well as reserving staff time to find valid information from among the false positive detections –

caused by wind, temperature and animal movements – is an “unmanageable task”.

“The AI successfully manages to sift through these detections and lift out those photos that show people and vehicles – about 3% of the total number of photos – thereby reducing the number of alerts that rangers need to review to just under 900,” he explained.

“Just recently the cameras alerted the ground staff to human movement, which allowed them to mobilise swift response and co-ordinated anti-poaching action that resulted in the capture of the identified person, who did turn out to be a poacher,” he pointed out.

It also helps that the cameras that form part of the system act as a deterrent on their own.

Peace Parks is currently scaling up the system from the 150 initial cameras to about 400.

The system is not currently being used to forecast poacher movements. However, Peace Parks says its AI journey roadmap includes plans to deploy that functionality systematically as the use and deployment of the system matures.

“The next step is to focus on the addition of various custom AIs to SnapCatch in order to gain additional insights and expand functionality,” added Gillings.

‘Technologies serve as a multiplication tool’ Owing to the sheer scale of the landscapes they protect, together with challenges like remote and sometimes inaccessible terrain, conservation areas across the continent struggle with resource limitations. Gillings believes technology has the ability to significantly multiply how effective staff can become.

“Technologies serve as a multiplication tool – to enable us to act in line with the immense scale and tempo that is necessary to stand against current environmental challenges,” he said.

Peace Parks AI-powered anti-poaching system forms part of its smart park technology strategy which focuses on interactive and agile deployments that enable the non-profit to assist conservation agencies like Ezemvelo to incrementally deploy solutions as fast as possible in a way that enables refinement and enhancement as needed.

Gillings explained that the smart park technology strategy focuses on data collection, built networks and mechanisms to centralise information in a way that leverages the elasticity of the cloud to enable Peace Parks to effortlessly scale.

“SnapCatch is fully deployed through DevOps for example, enabling our infrastructure and code to be version controlled as we go,” he added.

Peace Parks is also in the process of building an open source community around its solutions in hopes that it can rapidly scale out and make the solutions accessible to as many parks as possible.

“The above approach has enabled us to be very slim on dedicated resources to manage the ecosystem of tech,” he said. Gillings said many interested parties are looking at implementing similar solutions – some which are either edge or server based, based on local operating conditions and limitations.

“We are also collaborating with a number of them through Picture are (standing) Doug Gillings (Programme Manager: Combatting Wildlife Crime, Peace Parks Foundation) and Herman Stander (Technology Implementation Manager: Combatting Wildlife Crime, Peace Parks Foundation)

Pictured are (standing) Doug Gillings (Programme Manager: Combatting Wildlife Crime, Peace Parks Foundation) and Herman Stander (Technology Implementation Manager: Combatting Wildlife Crime, Peace Parks Foundation)

Microsoft’s AI for Earth programme, and see the future in open source and open standards to enable the agility of bespoke developments and innovations to be married with legacy systems as well as integrated with new and innovative developments,” she added.

Despite Peace Parks’ belief in the role of tech like AI in fighting poaching, the non-profit emphasised that these technologies can’t be successful when “used in a vacuum”. “Technology only works where effectively integrated as part of a larger ecosystem of people, tools, processes, policies, regulations and laws – that, when applied in harmony will achieve the type of successes that South Africa continues to achieve in decreasing the number of rhinos poached each year, “Technology is nothing without those who are on the ground ready to receive, analyse and act on the data provided,” he further explained.

So, while Peace Parks has found innovative ways to fight poaching through tech, the organisation maintains a holistic approach to combating wildlife crime. Peace Parks goes about this by enhancing protected area support on the ground, halting illegal trade through counter-trafficking activities, and by reducing demand through awareness as well as behavioural change campaigns – thereby impacting on all levels of the socalled wildlife crime supply chain.

With startups like Cape AI having expressed interest in running pilots in national parks and game reserves where the firm will use deep learning to analyse data to proactively identify poachers and animals in danger, it’s likely we will see AI play an increasingly important role in the fight against wildlife poaching on the continent. ai