wildtech.mongabay.com is a great resource
2 December 2015 10:40pm
Gaming for Good: Minecraft and Quiz Up
3 December 2015 12:00am
Building tech solutions from the ground up
30 November 2015 11:00am
30 November 2015 12:27pm
Thanks for contributing these thoughts and resources, Ken. Great to see you in the WILDLABS.NET community!
Beauty as a cheap monitoring tool for reefs?
26 November 2015 5:13pm
Case Study: Gaming for Good with Runescape and Angry Birds
26 November 2015 10:55am
Harnessing Big Data to Combat Illegal Wildlife, Timber and Fisheries Trade
26 November 2015 12:00am
Technology for Traceability
26 November 2015 12:00am
Live Event: Centre for Global Equality Seminar about drones and conservation
25 November 2015 12:44pm
Gaming for Good: Runescape and Angry Birds
25 November 2015 12:00am
Cheap Space, DIY Imaging and Big Data = Good News for Conservation
16 November 2015 7:48pm
Nov 18th: Cheap Space, DIY Imaging and Big Data
9 November 2015 2:36pm
From Data Collection to Decisions
6 November 2015 12:00am
What is eDNA?
2 November 2015 12:00am
The Social Lives of Conservation Technologies and Why They Matter
2 November 2015 12:00am
Frequently Asked Questions
30 October 2015 5:43pm
Wired in the Wild: Can Technology Save the Planet?
30 October 2015 12:00am
Technology to Combat Illegal Wildlife Trade
30 October 2015 12:00am
How can Technology Reduce Human-Wildlife Conflict?
29 October 2015 12:00am
3 December 2015 2:19pm
Thanks for the link - yes, I agree Mongabay's WildTech areas is a great resource for anyone interested in keeping up to date with the latest conservation tech news. Sue Palminteri's article is facinating and is definitely worth a read. The video showing the daily movement of elephants is particularly interesting (see the screenshot below) - it was a case study Katherine Chou of Google.org spoke about in her Fuller Symposium address as well. That they're getting close to real time monitoring is very exciting - it would have been amazing to have that capacity in other projects I've been involved with.
The key take-aways you highlight match a lot of what came up in the Fuller Symposium and other discussions about HWC. The consensus from Wired in the Wild - Can technology save the planet? was that no, it cannot. It is simply a very useful tool that, when used appropriately, could have significant impacts in the challenges conservation is attempting to tackle. Numerous speakers drove home the point that technology is not and should not be the starting point; we need to be technology agnostic. We must start by understanding the challenge and then looking at what (if any) technology might help to address it given the circumstances.
The Elephants and Bees approach is a great example of why we need to start with challenge rather than the technology. Sometimes the best solution is the low tech approach. Nilanga Jayasinghe highlighed this in her thought piece about HWC - giving a similar example of work WWF is doing in Nepal:
'During a recent visit to Nepal, I visited rural villages where wild elephants often raid rice fields during harvest season. The communities had installed electric fences but this tool didn't always succeed on its own. Elephants are smart and persistent: they had learned to break the fence’s electric current, and then the fence itself, by using trees to push over the supporting stakes. To solve this problem, we worked with farmers to dig fish ponds in front of the fences as an additional obstacle. Adding an additional barrier not only made it harder for the elephants to get into the fields, it also gave the communities more time to respond and drive elephants away. This simple solution has not only reduced elephant raids, but has also improved local livelihoods from the sale of the fish grown in the ponds.'