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Tech Firm Sigfox Develops Tiny Tracker To Help Fight Rhino Poaching (reuters.com)
French tech company Sigfox has developed a bite-size tracker that can be inserted into the horns of rhinos to help conservationists monitor and protect the endangered species. From a report: With the dramatic decline of animal species in the past century mostly due to poaching and urban expansion, wildlife organizations have turned to technology to help safeguard species being pushed towards extinction. The global number of rhinos dwindled to about 20,000 a decade ago due to relentless poaching, though they have rebounded to about 29,000 thanks to conservation efforts. Cameras, infrared and motion sensors, electronic bracelets and drones have been used over the years to protect endangered species, but have at times been limited by vast distances and limited resources in the countries concerned. Sigfox, known for building networks that link objects to the internet, has developed sensors able to give the exact location of rhinos using the firm's network over a longer period of time. [...] The sensors can alert park rangers when rhinos approach an area identified as particularly dangerous due to previous instances of poaching. Combined with other warning sensors, they can be used to get rescue teams to the location in real time.
Especially one great famous Rhino living in the area between San Jose and Palo Alto.
Poison the horn with chemical castration drugs.
Have they properly secured these tracking devices so that the poachers can't hack into the system and find their prey easily? Or is this going to be another iteration of typical 'IoT' crap, where nobody even bothered to use basic encryption or passwords more complicated than 'password123'?
Could they notice when a horn starts going over 40mph? Say like when a poacher is driving off with the horn?
btw: Old Chinese guys trust ancient secrets more than medical science. They want the horn used by their grandfathers, not pill used by Murica.
I've always said the only way to stop rhino horn & elephant tusk poaching is to make possession of either punishable by summary execution worldwide. Literally from positive ID of said item to a bullet in the skull within seconds. Any existing pieces in private hands worth saving should be given to a museum, the rest destroyed.
These are critically endangered animals and when they're gone, they're gone whereas there's over 7 billion humans; the execution of a few thousand of whom would actually have a net benefit to the environment.
Once possessing even a tiny quantity is rhino horn is a guaranteed death sentence, especially combined with a number of sting operations resulting in public executions, should reduce the demand by a huge factor.
The new trackers also help the Rhinos count their steps more accurately than the Fitbits used in the prototype phase.
[ and, poaching a Rhino seems inefficient and dumb vs. broiling ... :-) ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Instead of all the expensive, high tech stuff, might the just allow people to raise and harvest rhinos? When tried in South Africa, the rhino population spiked and the poaching dipped (why take the chance of getting nabbed poaching what has become a commodity item?)
Of course, the "animal protectionist" don't care for that idea, because . . . REASONS?
Alligator farming became a thing in the southern US, providing a valuable source of handbags, shoes and tough, tasteless, chewy meat, and the alligators are becoming the pests that they once were.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Arrange some safaris for mercenarys. No penalties, take as many poachers as you wish.
Have gnu, will travel.
So, um, the POACHERS can't use these trackers to find the location of the animals they are hunting?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It looks like a neat little unit; a few seconds into the video they show a potted device with a sigfox module on one side, another photo shows a GNSS module on the other (with a patch antenna on top, similar to this), and a Saft LS14250 LiSOCl2 battery (nominally 4.3 Wh). A GNSS position fix consumes up to ~1 mWh, and a Sigfox transmission should consume less than that, so they should have more than enough energy budget to last the three years comfortably.
Interestingly if they'd used LoRaWAN instead they may not have needed the GNSS module. Sigfox's geolocation via radio signal strength has a precision of 1 - 10 km, whereas LoRaWAN can use multilateration (time difference of arrival) and get down to ~200 metres. That should be more than enough precision to track a rhino's movement towards a dangerous area, which means the device could last longer without using a GNSS module. LoRa competes with Sigfox, so someone else would have to do it, but it could be an interesting approach to animal tracking.
I was looking recently at some of the sensor options after I saw something about a water alert one (put it on the floor in flood-prone areas, it alerts if water is detected) with a multi-year battery life.
There are a variety of other sensors available and I was thinking about use for server room temperature monitoring (possibly also door opening?), but the network coverage in the USA is only regional.
fencepost
just a little off
Can't they tranquilize the rhinos and cut off their horns to eliminate the appeal of poaching?
Wouldn't the simplest solution be to simply kill all the rhinos thus removing the source of illicit trade? Besides, how they cook their rhinos is their own business. I prefer deep fried rhino to poached.
Article published about 'secret' trackers mysteriously makes it harder to catch poachers ...