Hello Loveness!!

SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool) is a comprehensive system used by conservation organizations and protected area managers to combat poaching and enhance law enforcement effectiveness. Here’s how SMART contributes to these efforts:

1. Data Collection and Management

Patrol Data: Rangers and patrol teams collect data using handheld devices, smartphones, or GPS units. This data includes:

• Locations of patrols
• Sightings of wildlife
• Evidence of illegal activities (e.g., snares, poached animals)
• Encounters with poachers

Centralized Database: All collected data is uploaded to a centralized database, allowing for systematic storage, retrieval, and analysis.

2. Monitoring and Analysis

Spatial Analysis: SMART uses GIS to analyze spatial data. This helps in identifying:

• Poaching hotspots
• Trends and patterns in illegal activities
• Areas requiring increased patrol efforts

Performance Metrics: The tool provides various performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate patrol effectiveness and coverage.

3. Real-time Reporting

Alerts and Notifications: SMART can be configured to send real-time alerts to managers and enforcement teams when illegal activities are detected, enabling rapid response.

Dashboard and Reports: Users can generate reports and visual dashboards summarizing patrol efforts, findings, and enforcement actions. These are crucial for informing management decisions and strategy adjustments.

4. Resource Allocation

Optimal Deployment: By identifying high-risk areas and times, SMART helps in the optimal allocation of patrol teams and resources. This ensures that efforts are focused where they are most needed.

Efficient Planning: The tool assists in planning patrol routes and schedules, maximizing coverage and reducing redundancy that is why it is known by training honest Rangers.

5. Community Engagement and Collaboration

Local Involvement: SMART can incorporate data from community scouts and informants, enhancing local engagement and support for conservation efforts.

NB: I will share with you some of training materials which will help you to get started with SMART course.

Good start, Loveness

In addition to the suggestions already listed, I'd recommend engaging with the SMART Community Forum:

There are also many peer reviewed papers on the topic, for example:

Conservation Technology

The global loss of biodiversity is occurring at an unprecedented pace. Despite the considerable effort devoted to conservation science and management, we still lack even the most basic data on the distribution and density of the majority of plant and animal species, which in turn hampers our efforts to study changes over time. In addition, we often lack behavioural data from the very animals most influenced by environmental changes; this is largely due to the financial and logistical limitations associated with gathering scientific data on species that are cryptic, widely distributed, range over large areas, or negatively influenced by human presence. To overcome these limitations, conservationists are increasingly employing technology to facilitate such data collection. Innovative solutions have been driven by dramatic advances in the conservation-technology interface. The use of camera traps, acoustic sensors, satellite data, drones, and computer algorithms to analyse the large datasets collected are all becoming increasingly widespread. Although specialist books are available on some of these individual technologies, this is the first comprehensive text to describe the breadth of available technology for conservation and to evaluate its varied applications, bringing together a team of international experts using a diverse range of approaches. Conservation Technology is suitable for graduate level students, professional researchers, practitioners and field managers in the fields of ecology and conservation biology.

Google Books

http://www.primate-sg.org/storage/pdf/VJP_3_4_pp59-68.pdf

Willingness to Adopt the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART): The Case of Ugalla Game Reserve, Tanzania.

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Law Enforcement for Wildlife Conservation (Chapter 2) - Artificial Intelligence and Conservation

Artificial Intelligence and Conservation - March 2019

Cambridge Core

Asia-Pacific Forest Sector Outlook: Innovative forestry for a sustainable future

Young students and people, formally or informally engaged in the forest sector, will be the guardians and managers of tomorrow’s forests. Technology savvy, the youth can play an instrumental role in the uptake and scaling-up of innovative technologies (whether digital technologies, biological technologies, technical innovations on processes and products, or innovative finance and social innovations), able to advance sustainable development in the forest sector in the region. Young people can bring in the innovation debate forward-looking perspectives and out-of-the-box thinking. This is why FAO and CIFOR/FTA decided to strengthen their voice in the debate, relaying their experiences and propositions for sustainable innovation in the forest sector. This FAO and CIFOR co-publication gathers 13 youth contributions, carefully selected. These contributions illustrate, in various contexts, the potential of innovative technologies to advance sustainable forestry and sustainable forest management in the Asia-Pacific region.

Google Books

What about thermal cameras and drones with thermal cameras for monitoring of mammals?

Hi,

maybe this could be a candidate for a best practice guide 😉 My free manual 'Drones in Biomonitoring' - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8077113 It canhelp to get (more) knowledge how to proceed easily and successfully 😉 

It covers topics from buy to fly and data processing.

📖 The manual was developed to help authorities, landscape conservation / maintenance or nature conservation associations etc. in nature conservation to manage their growing monitoring tasks more effectively and cost-efficiently.
🛸 The use of drones can contribute in many ways to increasing the effectiveness of monitoring, reducing costs and minimizing disturbance - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steffen-Doering.

Best regards!
Steffen

This is really interesting, thank you for sharing this knowledge

Support for two cameras (or more) can be done by using two USB powered cameras if you have the right platform. Then in principle you can place each camera up to 2m from the processor.

I’ll will be experimenting with such a setup as soon as my USB global shutter camera arrives. Global shutter camera work really well with the AI computer vision that my system uses. Quite a different power category than microcontrollers though.

Currently I’m testing a Raspberry Pi based camera system that is capturing images and video, scanning 3x cameras with ai triggering.

very nice paper Cathy!!! 

This would be awesome Andrew! Happy to help with some organization of this/identifying potential chapter authors. 

I'm sure you know about this already, but there is also this book from Wich & Piel: https://www.amazon.com/Conservation-Technology-Serge-Wich/dp/0198850255 

Hi Andew,

Whatever became of your book? Also have you seen jupyterbook.org and mystmd.org? Both are free and open source software for publishing articles and books.

Best,

Vance

so great!!

It would be great to address data collection, handling and storage. It starts with keeping good records of field deployments so that devices can be refound and helps at the time of analysis and reporting and so studies can be reproduced. Having an understanding of metadata standards for data types as these are often overlooked when projects are starting up. Knowing if there are existing databases or repositories for your data or if you will have to 'roll your own' (something more than an Excel spreadsheet, or at least knowing the potential pitfalls of relying on spreadsheets). That would be a great advantage when entering the workforce and working in this field.

Hi Amit,

The most important thing is that the livestock owners contact you as soon as possible after finding the carcass. We commonly do two things if they contact us on the same day or just after the livestock was killed:

1. Use CyberTracker (or similar software) on an Android smart phone to record all tracks, bite marks, feeding pattern and any other relevant signs of the reason for the loss with pictures and GPS coordinates. [BTW, Compensation is a big issue -- What do you do if the livestock was stolen? What do you do if a domestic animal killed the livestock? What if it died from disease or natural causes and was scavenged upon by carnivores afterwards?]
2. In the case of most cats, they would hide the prey (or just mark it by covering it with grass or branches and urinating in the area). In this case you can put up a camera trap on the carcass to capture the animal when it returns to its kill (Reconyx is good if you can afford it - we use mostly Cuddeback with white flash). This will normally only work if the carcass is fresh (so other predators would not be able to smell it and not know where it is yet), so the camera only has to be up for 3-5 days max.

This is not really high-tech, but can be very useful to not only establish which predator was responsible (or if a predator was responsible), but also to record all the evidence for that.

Hey Amit, 

This is a great question; from our work, we've seen people do a couple of things. We've even seen people using Ring doorbell footage in urban areas as evidence. 

The best thing we've seen is matching the community needs with existing infrastructure: 

• Are there existing cameras you can leverage, like the doorbell cameras? 
• Can public participation monitoring service this, i.e. public submitted photos and videos? 

It also totally depends on the wildlife species you're working with, the interaction, damages, etc. If you've found any good solutions, let me know. I'd love to share that information with our clients here who have constant bear problems. 

Congratulations, very exciting! Keep us updated!

This is so cool @Mauricio_Akmentins - congrats and look forward to seeing your project evolve!

Congratulations! My first hydromoth was just arrived yesterday and so excited! Looking forward for the update from your project!!!