In the fight to protect Africa’s endangered wildlife, powerful technologies such as cloud computing, drones, and machine learning can play a critical role to enhance conservation efforts and combat the destructive impact of a highly lucrative poaching trade.
In one on-going collaboration between SAP’s Co-Innovation Lab and ERP.ngo, the strides made to combat the poaching of rhinos and elephants could become a blueprint for conservation efforts across the continent.
According to Rudi de Louw, Head of the Co-Innovation Lab at SAP Africa, advances in technology and new ways of collaborating are paving the way for the development of innovative solutions to protect Africa’s wildlife. “Having powerful technology means nothing if you can’t guarantee accuracy and consistency in the data and outcomes it produces. We undertook an extensive and on-going co-innovation project with ERP.ngo focusing on technical feasibility, product development and refinement. The outcomes are exciting and potentially game-changing – especially, in this case, for an elephant and rhino population that remains under siege.”
There are an estimated 30,000 rhinos remaining in the wild today, a significant decrease – largely due to poaching and a disappearing habitat – from the half a million that roamed Africa and Asia at the start of the 20th century. Rhino poaching reached crisis levels in the last decade, with instances in South Africa increasing more than 9,000% from 13 in 2007 to 1,215 in 2014. Encouragingly, the latest figures show a sharp decline in rhino poaching activity, with 594 cases in 2019.
Elephants have also been targeted. After a single poaching incident in 2014 – the first in South Africa in a decade – elephant poaching activity spiked, with 71 reported cases in 2018. The latest official figures show a decrease of more than half for 2019.
People, tech enhance conservation efforts
Elephants, Rhinos & People (ERP) was founded to preserve and protect Southern Africa’s wild elephants and rhinos through a strategy that is based on rural poverty alleviation through the non-profit organisation ERP.ngo. It forms part of the structure of groupelephant.com, a largely employee-owned group of companies, non-profits and impact investment organisations with a strong global presence that also includes EPI-USE, the world’s largest independent SAP Human Capital Management specialist.
Since 2017, ERP.ngo has piloted a highly successful anti-poaching strategy that has completely eliminated poaching in each of the areas it monitors. David Allen, ERP Air Force project lead at ERP.ngo says the deployment of new technologies has been a core element of the initiative’s success. “Following a year-long testing and innovation process in partnership with the Co-Innovation Lab, we have made major strides in refining our machine vision, machine learning and response capabilities.”
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was initially used to monitor the movement of elephants but was quickly deployed to provide a layer of intelligence to how teams responded to alerts. “This way a guard could make an informed decision over whether there’s need for an anti-poaching team or, in the case of a fire, a fire team without first having to travel out to the affected area. We gradually expanded this layer of intelligence to other areas,” says Allen.
Tech at the heart of conservation efforts
Allen says one of the first priorities for the project was to address occasional instabilities in their prototype IT environment. “The Co-Innovation Lab team helped us migrate to SAP Cloud Platform and SAP is providing three years’ cloud hosting to support the production process.”
Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Experience Marketing at SAP, who led the team, says the project marked a world-first for the organisation. “While we have supported non-profit organisations by providing our on-premise solutions before, this was the first time we supported a partner in the cloud and illustrates how the brave new world of cloud is transforming businesses of all sizes.”
Following the migration, ERP.ngo and the Co-Innovation Lab started working on technical feasibility tests for some of their more ambitious ideas, many of which have over time proven invaluable to the success of conservation efforts. One of these ambitious ideas, according to De Louw, involves extensive development of machine learning algorithms to enable the team to improve its response, data capturing and processing capabilities.
“A network of different cameras within the reserve trigger whenever movement is detected. Machine vision is used to track movement while machine learning algorithms help distinguish between threats and non-threats. This has required us to feed our algorithms vast amounts of data to train them to distinguish between animals, people and other movement.”
This accuracy is important: as soon as rangers receive too many alerts – especially if they prove to be false – trust in the system starts eroding. “We need to reduce false-positives to ensure rangers are only alerted when something requires their attention. This is simpler to accomplish with the on-the-ground cameras, but our UAV-mounted cameras require significant further training and development. A rhino seen from ground level is fairly easy to distinguish from an elephant or person, but as soon as you take an aerial view, animals tend to fade into the landscape. As our data set grows and we refine our machine learning algorithm, these types of inaccuracies will be resolved over time.”
ERP.ngo eventually wants to roll out its technology model to other conservation areas in South Africa and, in time, in other parts of Africa. “We are already working on opportunities to scale our solution to reach other reserves. Through a range of community initiatives, we hope to mobilise local communities to support conservation efforts while also unlocking greater skills development and economic opportunities in the process. With our partners at the Co-Innovation Lab, we will also continue to refine the technology underpinning our efforts to protect some of our continent’s most majestic endangered animals.”
Source: Sapnews
