Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Hobby drones help keep elephants safe from stones, poison, and poachers

Dyllan Furness
By

Hobby drones have been shown to be effective in preventing human-elephant conflict in Tanzania, where the animals tend to leave the safety of national parks in search of newly grown crops.

It takes a just few hours for a herd of elephants to decimate a subsistence farm, which can be devastating for communities that are already fighting poverty. Farmers often resort to throwing rocks or banging drums to drive off the massive animals. At wit’s end, they may even attempt to poison the elephants or let poachers intervene.

Related Videos

But conservationists have found they can deter the elephants from entering certain regions by deploying hobby drones to scare them off. The sound seems to spook them. A team of trained rangers along the border of Tarangire and Serengeti National Parks in Tanzania have taken the drones (unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs) on over 120 flights with promising results. The research from Resolves’s Biodiversity and Wildlife Solutions program, the Tanzanian Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI), and the Mara Elephant Project published a paper describing their work in the journal Oryx.

“We’ve stressed the importance of data collection throughout this project,” lead author Nathan Hahn from Resolve’s Biodiversity and Wildlife Solutions said in a press release. “There is sometimes a tendency to overstate the power of new technologies, and we wanted to fairly assess the utility of the drones for moving elephants out of crops and other areas. The results are very positive and show that UAVs can be an effective, flexible way for wildlife managers to deal with human-elephant conflict.”

One of the biggest benefits of using drones is that the rangers and farmers can stay a safe distance from the elephants, which keeps all involved — both man and beast — safer. Humans don’t have to put themselves in harm’s way and the elephants don’t run the risk of an encounter with a resentful farmer or poacher.

The drone solution may only be temporary though. For one, there’s some concern that the elephants could grow used to the drones and no longer retreat. And the conservationists insist that the conflict will only end when elephants are given larger protected areas and more secure travel corridors. In the meantime, this technology may be the elephants’ best bet for survival.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Optical illusions could help us build the next generation of AI
Artificial intelligence digital eye closeup.

You look at an image of a black circle on a grid of circular dots. It resembles a hole burned into a piece of white mesh material, although it’s actually a flat, stationary image on a screen or piece of paper. But your brain doesn’t comprehend it like that. Like some low-level hallucinatory experience, your mind trips out; perceiving the static image as the mouth of a black tunnel that’s moving towards you.

Responding to the verisimilitude of the effect, the body starts to unconsciously react: the eye’s pupils dilate to let more light in, just as they would adjust if you were about to be plunged into darkness to ensure the best possible vision.

Read more
Meta wants to supercharge Wikipedia with an AI upgrade
the wikipedia logo on a pink background

Wikipedia has a problem. And Meta, the not-too-long-ago rebranded Facebook, may just have the answer.

Let’s back up. Wikipedia is one of the largest-scale collaborative projects in human history, with more than 100,000 volunteer human editors contributing to the construction and maintenance of a mind-bogglingly large, multi-language encyclopedia consisting of millions of articles. Upward of 17,000 new articles are added to Wikipedia each month, while tweaks and modifications are continuously made to its existing corpus of articles. The most popular Wiki articles have been edited thousands of times, reflecting the very latest research, insights, and up-to-the-minute information.

Read more
The next big thing in science is already in your pocket
A researcher looks at a protein diagram on his monitor

Supercomputers are an essential part of modern science. By crunching numbers and performing calculations that would take eons for us humans to complete by ourselves, they help us do things that would otherwise be impossible, like predicting hurricane flight paths, simulating nuclear disasters, or modeling how experimental drugs might effect human cells. But that computing power comes at a price -- literally. Supercomputer-dependent research is notoriously expensive. It's not uncommon for research institutions to pay upward of $1,000 for a single hour of supercomputer use, and sometimes more, depending on the hardware that's required.

But lately, rather than relying on big, expensive supercomputers, more and more scientists are turning to a different method for their number-crunching needs: distributed supercomputing. You've probably heard of this before. Instead of relying on a single, centralized computer to perform a given task, this crowdsourced style of computing draws computational power from a distributed network of volunteers, typically by running special software on home PCs or smartphones. Individually, these volunteer computers aren't particularly powerful, but if you string enough of them together, their collective power can easily eclipse that of any centralized supercomputer -- and often for a fraction of the cost.

Read more