Sensors help preserve endangered wildlife
If he has his way, Paul Allen will have 90,000 square miles of African territory covered with smart sensors and drones by the end of this year to bring hyper-connectivity to Africa's remotest, most wildlife-packed corners. It's the biggest conservation tech project to date: a commandand-control system for rangers to record and respond to poaching threats, from Kenya to Tanzania.
Allen's Domain Awareness System (DAS), a project he is funding through his company Vulcan, is as simple in concept as it is complex in execution. It's unsexy in the most fundamental of ways — and yet it's the likely key to one of sexiest philanthropic causes of our time.
The basic idea: studying endangered animals' movements in order to get ahead of poachers on a scale that allows Big Data to predict threats across entire regions.
For years, local rangers have protected wildlife with boots on the ground and sheer determination: armed guards spending days and nights surrounding elephant herds and horned rhinos, on the lookout for rogue trespassers.
Allen's DAS uses technology to go the distance that humans cannot. It relies on three funnels of information: ranger radios, animal tracker tags, and a variety of environmental sensors such as camera traps and satellites.
This being the product of the world's 10th-richest software developer, it sends everything back to a centralized computer system, which projects specific threats onto a map of the monitored region, displayed on large screens in a closed circuit-like security room.
For instance, if a poacher were to break through a geofence sensor set up by a ranger in a highly-trafficked poaching corridor, an icon of a rifle would flag the threat alongside any micro-chipped elephants and radio-carrying rangers in the vicinity.
Think of DAS as similar to a comprehensive camera system in Vegas casinos, with park managers replacing pit bosses on the hunt for cheats and camo-sporting rangers in place of the security guards that flank blackjack tables. Except in this case, when alerts strike, managers aren't preventing the hemorrhage of a couple hundred thousand dollars; they're dispatching help to save one of 352,271 estimated remaining elephants, or one of 30,000 surviving rhinoceroses.
"By nature, I am attracted to tough problems — problems that, by definition, require innovative and dramatic solutions," said Allen from his office in Seattle, where his philanthropic company, Vulcan Inc., is based.