A Comprehensive Overview of Technologies for Species and Habitat Monitoring and Conservation

Abstract

The range of technologies currently used in biodiversity conservation is staggering, with innovative uses often adopted from other disciplines and being trialed in the field. We provide the first comprehensive overview of the current (2020) landscape of conservation technology, encompassing technologies for monitoring wildlife and habitats, as well as for on-the-ground conservation management (e.g., fighting illegal activities). We cover both established technologies (routinely deployed in conservation, backed by substantial field experience and scientific literature) and novel technologies or technology applications (typically at trial stage, only recently used in conservation), providing examples of conservation applications for both types. We describe technologies that deploy sensors that are fixed or portable, attached to vehicles (terrestrial, aquatic, or airborne) or to animals (biologging), complemented with a section on wildlife tracking. The last two sections cover actuators and computing (including web platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence).

Monitoring Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Review of Aspirations and Deployments in Zoos

“…Used for observation of wildlife in their natural habitat and overview of thermal physics and the thermal imager, [55] included a manual on sound survey design, theory and performance characteristics of thermal imaging cameras with cooled quantum detectors and uncooled micro bolometric imagers as introduced in past decades [55]. [56] describes how thermal images (or thermographic cameras) work and presents some examples of using this technology in a variety of contexts beyond wildlife monitoring, including research on migrations [57], behaviour (e.g., flight patterns; [58]), welfare and disease diagnosis [59], to avoid killing of animals (e.g., farmland bird nests, fawns) during mowing [60], to detect wind farm collisions of birds [61].…”

“…Recent novel work determined optimal flight altitudes for minimizing drone disturbance for wildlife using species audiograms [78]. While Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) [15], [79] is useful technology for sound recording and automatic sound identification of animals in the wild [56], [80], use is restricted by privacy issues for zoo environments.…”

Coproduce Conservation Technology With Conservation Decision Makers and Practitioners to Increase Its Impact

“…New technologies can be part of the solution to the biodiversity crisis: they can both improve the efficiency of carrying out conservation and enable conservation actions that are otherwise infeasible. For example, hardware technologies have been an essential part of preventing and responding to poaching (Dinerstein, 2018), surveying populations (Lahoz-Monfort and Magrath, 2021), and reducing the impacts of development such as wind power (McClure et al, 2018). Software, from day-to-day tools like ArcGIS (ESRI, 2021) and conservation planning tools like Marxan (Marxan, 2020), Global Forest Watch (Global Forest Watch, 2021, SMART (SMART, 2021) and others, have made it easy to calculate complex spatial statistics or prioritization landscapes that were previously not possible or commonplace.…”

Coproduce conservation technology with conservation decisionmakers and practitioners to increase its impact

“…New technologies can be part of the solution to the biodiversity crisis: they can both improve the efficiency of carrying out conservation and enable conservation actions that are otherwise infeasible. For example, hardware technologies have been an essential part of preventing and responding to poaching (Dinnerstein, 2018), surveying populations (Lahoz-Monfort & Magrath, 2021), and reducing the impacts of development such as wind power (McClure et al 2018). Software, from day-to-day tools like ArcGIS (Esri, 2021) and conservation planning tools like Marxan (Marxan, 2020), Global Forest Watch (Global Forest Watch, 2021, SMART (SMART, 2021) and others, have made it easy to calculate complex spatial statistics or prioritization landscapes that were previously not possible or commonplace.…”