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Dear NE-One
I’m writing to you from inside our tent in Addo Elephant National Park. It’s been a drizzly morning, and we’re waiting for things to dry up a little before we break camp and drive on to Graaff-Reinet, an historic town completely surrounded by the Camdeboo National Park, where we’ll pitch camp again this afternoon. We’re moving fast, travelling intensely, and packing as much research as possible into each day while maximizing writing time on our computers at night and in the early mornings. (I’m working on Lonely Planet’s new guide to South Africa and Mark, who’s come along for the ride, is writing Vagabond, the book about his 1225km walk across Spain, which will be released around July next year.)
The beauty of being in a national park is that life has slowed down a little down as we’ve take long, unhurried drives to see what the park has to offer. It’s certainly lived up to its name – yesterday we watched about 80 elephants at one of the waterholes – and along with scores of kudu, zebra and warthog we’ve also seen three black rhinos.
Watching these magnificent – and endangered – animals has taken my mind back to Welgevonden, a private nature reserve in the Waterberg area just north of Pretoria. We were there two years ago to look into how technology is being used to protect rhinos; it’s a fascinating approach, one that involves algorithms, animal behaviour and an unexpected alarm system, and the feature I wrote from that trip is the story I’ve shared with you here….
Sentinel Animals
It’s late on a quiet Waterberg afternoon. The sun is just starting to dip behind the hills when a herd of grazing zebra suddenly clusters together on the grassland. As one unit they accelerate, walking faster than usual in a straight line towards the rocky slope of a hill, which they ascend before disappearing beneath the branches of an acacia thicket.
For 20 minutes the movement of the herd is aligned: they move in the same direction, at the same speed. The zebras remain together in a part of the landscape that requires them to spend more energy than they consume – there’s not much grazing on the rocky ground under those trees – until, some 47 minutes after the herd clustered together, the zebras filter back to the grasslands.
Thirteen thousand kilometres away at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the researchers who’ve tracked these animals for 11 months know that this is not normal zebra behaviour, and that this particular movement pattern could have been triggered by only one thing: a human carrying a rifle. They have algorithms based on almost 15-million protocol data units to prove it.
There is a gentle collision of worlds out here in the Waterberg: in an area that contains among the oldest sedimentary rocks on the planet, researchers and IT experts have been exploring ways to use the latest technologies to protect the planet’s wildlife. Not that you’d know it if you’re visiting Welgevonden Game Reserve; once you’ve entered the gates you step into the peace of a true wilderness experience, where the noise of modern life – technology and all – seems a world away. There’s not even a cellphone signal to be found.
“That’s just the way we want it,” explains Welgevonden’s chairman, Francois Spruyt, who has been associated with a lodge on the 37,000-hectare private reserve for more than two decades. “In fact, we work quite hard to keep cellphone signals off Welgevonden. We don’t want to give poachers access to that technology.”
As with rhino owners across South Africa, Welgevonden has adopted stringent measures to protect the species. The reserve has a highly trained anti-poaching unit; they tap into local intelligence; from their Joint Operations Centre the Welgevonden team monitors the location of vehicles and staff within and around the reserve; and, by collaborating with neighbours, local police and other law-enforcement organisations, they have created a buffer zone that has dramatically reduced general crime incidents in the surrounding areas.
“We’ve refined our conventional capability to be as good as it can be,” reflects Spruyt, adding that [at time of going to press] there had been only two rhino-poaching attempts at Welgevonden, in 2008 and 2015, and that no horn has been removed illegally from the reserve. “As good as our army might be, we need to remain ahead of the poachers –so we came upon the idea of developing a technology advantage, because the only technology capability that poachers have are cellphones.”
Welgevonden is highly IT organised; technology and science have always been central to guiding its ecological management process and it is out here, less than three hours north of Johannesburg, that science, tech and nature merge. It is also here that zebras (and kudu, wildebeest and eland) have the potential to step up as the new heroes in the plight to save rhinos – but for it all to make sense, this story needs to shift back more than a decade.
In around 2010 researchers at Wageningen University, whose environmental and animal sciences departments are ranked among the top in the world, studied the movement behaviour of domestic cattle. They developed algorithms that, by tracking its movement, could determine the gender of an animal, whether it was juvenile or adult, healthy or sick. The researchers could even tell if a cow needed to be milked.
The Dutch university has a longstanding relationship with Welgevonden and so in 2013 Herbert Prins, emeritus professor in Resource Ecology at Wageningen, approached the reserve’s directors: perhaps we could use movement technology to measure and interpret the behaviour of wild animals. Based on the promising results of an informal experiment with zebra and wildebeest, Prins secured €2-million funding from the Dutch government to take the research further.
Serendipitously, around the same time IBM and MTN approached Welgevonden: they wanted to test an Internet of Things-based solution where, by placing sensors on rhinos, anti-poaching units could monitor the animals – and catch poachers. A solid idea but the problem, the conservationists pointed out, was that if the sensor detected the rhino’s heart had stopped beating, it was too late to save the rhino.
But… what if other animals wore the sensors? If their movement behaviour could be measured, as with the cattle, then perhaps they could give an early warning if poachers moved into an area.
Introductions were made, partnerships formed and ideas shared, and in 2017 the Sentinel Animal Poacher Detection System proof-of-concept got underway at Welgevonden. Twelve hundred hectares were fenced off and 138 animals were collared with sensors that recorded GPS location, 3D acceleration, and temperature. Over the course of 11 months (the battery life of the sensors) five solar-powered LoRa (long range, low power wide area network) towers transmitted more than 65-million pieces of data via MTN networks to IBM and Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
“This was the densest coverage of animal movements ever recorded, anywhere on earth,” says Prins, who headed up the research. “We collared zebra, impala, wildebeest and eland, because their population density is sufficient enough for them to have a higher chance of encountering poachers. They live in social groups so may benefit if they give warning signs to each other, and they’re unlikely targets for rhino poachers. And because they favour different terrains, we were able to monitor the whole area.”
Using an Internet-of-Things architecture, data was transmitted every minute from each sensor for 11 months, allowing machines to build algorithms that show the natural patterns of the animals’ movements. During that time there were 57 experimental intrusions – Welgevonden staff (carrying sensors) who viewed the animals from a vehicle, walked unarmed in the bush, and walked carrying rifles – and algorithms were created to show the animals’ responses to these.
Earlier this year the results were published in a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature Portfolio: when the sentinel animals encountered experimental intrusions they moved faster, straighter, away from the intrusion and with higher body acceleration. The 2017 experiment was successful in showing not only that movement behaviour of wild animals can be interpreted, but that there is an 85 percent success rate in detecting the presence of would-be poachers.
Work on the next phase, proof of production, was delayed due to the pandemic, but Spruyt is hopeful that it will be up and running in 2022. One update, due to be tested in this next phase, is that instead of collars the eland, wildebeest and kudu (chosen to replace impala as they have a longer lifespan) will wear small, solar-powered sensors – visible from a distance of about 10 metres – clipped into their ears. Zebras use their heads while fighting, so they will still wear collar-mounted sensors – but the collars will be camouflaged against their hide.
Once the logistics have been ironed out, partners and sponsors secured, systems updated and a few thousand animals “sensorised”, data will feed into Welgevonden’s security system at the reserve’s Joint Operations Centre. If the system picks up poacher-triggered behaviour in the sentinel animals, an alert will go through to the anti-poaching unit, who will receive details – accurate to within 500 metres – of where the poachers are located.
“Now that we’ve proved that wild animals’ movements can be measured,” concludes Spruyt, “our aim is to build a solution for the world. We hope to build a system that is not particular to our topography, geography or types of animals – we want to create a system that can be implemented almost anywhere to protect our planet’s endangered wildlife from poachers. It is with technology, I believe, that we have the power to outsmart them.”
As we head into the madness that is the end-of-year rush, time for all of us becomes even more precious – and so this will be my last newsletter for the year (paying subscribers, I’ve paused billing for this next month). I’m so grateful that you’ve chosen to subscribe to this NE Where journey, and to be part of a community that has grown to almost 600 subscribers through the year. Thank you so much for being here; I look forward to sharing more stories and interviews from early January. Wishing you a wonderful ending to 2023; let’s catch up again in early January.
With love
In a reading kinda mood? Put the kettle on…
Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Shale Biggs – adventure racer and mother of three girls
At My Table: The 106-year-old woman who speaks the language of skin
Packing up and moving on: The one thing that’s changed the way I travel
India – in 5 photos
Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Emma Vånemo: on walking and cycling solo across continents
At My Table: The 79-year-old woman who lives alone in the Siberian wilderness
Author interview: Mark Eveleigh on his novel Driftwood Chandeliers
The memory of dust – travels through Kenya in a Land Cruiser
Fascinating!
Encouraging progress. Much love to you and Mark. Graham and Spratty xxx