Blog from China 1: China is implementing strict new measures against illegal poaching. A colleague in the Northeast Forestry University showed us two pelts that had been confiscated – domestic dog furs dyed to broadly resemble tiger and snow leopard. The demand clearly outstrips supply.
The Duke Robotics club at the Pratt School of Engineering contacted us recently to ask if we would like to collaborate to build a drone to find footprints, like these trails of Amur tigers in the vast expanses of north-east China. http://robotics.pratt.duke.edu/projectsrcdrone.html
We’re honoured to have been selected, by the Duke University Africa Initiative, to develop a new course on non-invasive techniques for monitoring endangered species for Professor Stuart Pimm’s Lab.
Following the Tiger’s footprints? … see our Cat-Watch at National Geographic. Identifying individual tigers from their paw prints has been controversial. Exciting new methods combine field work and cutting-edge statistics from the software giant JMP to show how it can be done.
WildTrack with SAS volunteers and NC State electrical engineering group at Carolina Tiger Rescue on a hot day in June. We got lots of footprint images with the Kinect camera, and for the first time sampled the footprints for trace DNA. The tigers were hot and lethargic, and walked very slowly…
Some years ago we worked at Otjiwa in Namibia, using footprints to monitor a population of white rhino. We published a paper on this population in 2008. Subsequently we thought it would be interesting to look at shape analysis as another way of demonstrating real differences in the feet of…
We’re working with Duke PhD student Alexandra Sutton, who reports here on her research – trying to ameliorate human-wildlife conflict in Kenya. Alexandra is hoping to use footprints to identify rogue carnivores who routinely visit bomas (fences enclosing livestock) for an easy meal, and she’s working with local people to…
WildTrack has developed a non-invasive Footprint Identification Technique (FIT) which can identify endangered animals at the species, individual, age-class and sex levels. Animals have unique feet, in the same way that humans have unique fingerprints. This allows us to monitor their status and work with decision-makers in environmental and conservation…
Why the need to monitor endangered species? We face an unprecedented crisis in the loss of biodiversity on our planet. UNEP, the United Nations Environment Program, estimates that between 150 and 200 species are currently being lost every day. The renowned American evolutionary biologist, E.O, Wilson estimated that by 2100,…
