The Zoological Society London (ZSL), whose mission is to promote and achieve the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats, says it may have taken a step closer to fulfilling this undertaking with the development of a new camera system, which it calls Instant Detect.
Developed in partnership with other companies, including Seven Technologies Group, which specialises in security technology and helped train rangers on conservation sites on how best to use Instant Detect devices, ZSL hopes it will help in the fight against poaching, as well as the monitoring of endangered and other species.
Instant Detect is a camera trap system that uses satellite technology to send images from anywhere in the world, according to ZSL conservation technology unit project manager Louise Hartley.
"It's a camera that we would deploy in the wild, it has to be quite sturdy and it often uses motion triggers, so it will have a passive infrared sensor to detect heat changes, so as an animal or a person walks past an image will be captured, and it's just a great way to get an insight into the wild that you wouldn't be able to do if you were a person," she said.
The satellite node uses a Raspberry Pi computer to send the images via the Iridium satellite network, a satellite constellation providing voice and data coverage to satellite phones, pagers, and other integrated transceivers.
A filter moves across the lens detecting the change from day to night and adjusting the camera accordingly, so it can see in the dark using night vision.
"We're using it for anti-poaching purposes to improve security within protected areas. So an alert, an image, would be sent to an operations room and then rangers can then react accordingly to that alert," Hartley explained.
Instant Detect also has magnetic sensors that can pick up cars, guns and knives, also triggering an alert to local rangers.
The Instant Detect box has a camera lens in the middle, surrounded by an LED array used for night-time imagery using infrared flash - "so when it goes off you won't be able to see it, it's not visible to the human eye", said Hartley.
"We have here the passive infrared sensor, so that's the motion detector, so it detects heat change, so as a person or a species is walking in it will trigger an image to be taken," she added, "you can also set it to timelapse so you can set an image to be taken every four hours or every five hours for example."
The crucial part of the system, though, is how it talks to ZSL's monitors and to local rangers.
"When an image is taken there's a separate unit called the satellite node, and the images are sent via radio frequency to the satellite node and then the satellite node uses the Iridium Satellite Network to send that image to where you need it," Hartley said.
Other anti-poaching technologies have recently come to the fore, including the Real-Time Anti-Poaching Intelligence Device (RAPID) developed by conservation organisation Protect with support from the Humane Society International.
DNA analysis, acoustic traps, thermal imaging, and improving analytics and mapping are all contributing to the fight against poaching as well.
ZSL hopes Instant Detect could be a crucial addition to the growing arsenal in what remains a battle with high costs.
In the last 40 years, 95% of rhinoceroses have been poached, and more than 100 000 African elephants were illegally killed between 2011 and 2014, according to the charity group.
The Kruger Park, South Africa's main tourist draw, is at the front line of the battle against a recent surge in rhino poaching for the animal's horn to meet demand in other countries such as Vietnam, where it is a coveted ingredient in traditional medicine.
The poaching of rhinos there rose in 2015, although it was on the decline elsewhere in the country.
ZSL has limited ambitions for the time being on the device's usage, although they do eventually want to scale up and roll it out even further.
"For the business aspect of Instant Detect, we're really just using it for conservation purposes, so we'll roll it out to two different sites for anti-poaching or for remote monitoring. A lot of that will be through grant funding, but also we may sell additional systems to four conservation uses," Hartley said.
"We want to bring in new transmission methods," she added.
"So as new connectivity is improving around the world, in addition to satellite, we'd also like to have GSM capabilities in there, so when it is available we can send it by mobile networks, because it is a lot cheaper than satellite."
"We also want to look at how we can reduce the cost so it is more scalable and do things like improve image quality, so you get a really, really great image which would support evidence for example in prosecutions," she added.
According to Hartley, Instant Detect can also be used simply to monitor wildlife that are not threatened by poachers.
"We have a deployment in Antarctica to monitor penguins, so we're getting images back daily to look at the penguin behaviour and also look at environmental change in that area," she said.
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