CNN —
It's early morning in the Sera Community Reserve in northern Kenya, and the sun is shining over this vast semi-arid region. Bird calls and the squeak of boots are the only sounds for miles as a team led by Kenyan wildlife veterinarian Dr. Mukami Ruolo-Oundo closely tracks the white rhinoceros first discovered here in Samburu County.
Once common in the region, by the early 1990s rhino populations in northern Kenya had been decimated by poaching. However, the country's black rhino population has more than doubled since 1989, with a total of 1,900 black and white rhinos by December 2022, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service.
The Sera Conservancy has championed community-led rhino conservation efforts in this country. In 2015, it established East Africa's first community rhino sanctuary and introduced 10 endangered black rhinos. Today, that number has grown to 21 black rhinos, roaming freely across 107 square kilometers (41 square miles) of designated protected areas. In February 2024, he was joined by his four white rhinos from the nearby Rewa Reserve.
While searching on foot, Dr. Luolo Oundo discovered two female white rhinos. One of them, named Sarah, looks quite pregnant, but when the vet sneaks in, he notices something is very wrong.
Careful not to trespass on the rhino's territory for too long, and reluctant to intervene unnecessarily, she chooses a different approach. Using a protective technology tool called EarthRanger, she can monitor Sarah's movements remotely and in real time.
Before being transported, each of the four white rhinos will have GPS tags attached to their horns and ears, which will send real-time location information to remote devices such as mobile phones and to the conservation organization's operations center, which is staffed by Dr. Luolo Oundo. Sarah's position and movement can be monitored.
“This is like 'finding a friend' for rhinos,” EarthRanger co-founder Jake Wall told CNN.
Due to a sparse internet connection, Dr. Luolo-Oundo is unable to receive a clear signal from Sara's transmitter, but thankfully Sara is not alone. The female rhino named Allot never left her side, and through Allot's transmitter, Dr. Luolo Oundo saw Sarah barely moving for several hours, suggesting her condition was deteriorating. are doing. By using her drone to take pictures of her, the team was able to confirm that Sarah was in urgent need of help.
“We noticed that she had a fecal impaction. It was very large and the rectum and vulvar area were swollen,” says Dr. Luolo-Oundo. “She's in so much pain that she can't put her tail down. And you could tell she was a little lethargic, she really wanted to spend time lying down.” In such cases, we need to intervene to comfort her and relieve her of pain and suffering. ”
Emergency intervention will begin immediately, led by the Kenya Wildlife Service and Sera Reserve managers and rangers. Within hours, air, ground and additional veterinary support was mobilized, potentially saving not only Sarah's life but also the life of the unborn calf.
For Dr Luolo-Oundo, the key to protecting Kenya's wildlife is a balance between community and technology.
“I don't think technology and conservation can be separated in the future,” she says. We can never remove the human element, but technology always helps where we can't reach. ”
The story of EarthRanger, now used in 70 countries, began when co-founder Wall was studying elephants in Kenya.
“Around 2012, there was a serious poaching crisis in Kenya and I was wondering if there was a way to find elephants that were being killed. “This is the longest period of rest for an elephant,” he recalls.
“So I wrote an algorithm to determine if the elephant had stopped moving and if so,[the collar]would send an SMS. That was kind of the beginning.”
He said the system has evolved significantly since then and Sarah is currently one of the 9,000 animals Earthrangers track in Kenya alone, including elephants, lions, giraffes, turtles, sea turtles and 1,200 rhinos. He added that it was one of the animals.
Wall said the system can integrate data from more than 100 different devices. “Everything from elephant tracking devices to rhinoceros ear tags, lion collars,[giraffe]tail tags, to turtle shell devices.”
It can also receive information from sources such as vehicle tracking devices, satellites, and remote sensing alerts such as deforestation and fire alerts. “He brings everything together on one platform where you can easily visualize, analyze and act on it,” adds Wall. “All of this gives operators and managers a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening with real-time tools.”
According to EarthRanger, all of these devices are designed to be lightweight, durable, and unobtrusive so as not to affect the animals' natural behavior or cause discomfort to them. Dr Luolo Oundo says that for rhinos, wearing a tracker is similar to having a human's ear pierced.
Samuel Rekimarolo, wildlife conservation manager at the Northern Rangelands Trust, which includes the Serra Conservancy, uses this type of data to live track wildlife on land and in the ocean across 6.5 million hectares. For Lekimaroro, this has become a powerful tool in security operations such as wildlife movement, data collection, and identifying human-wildlife conflict hotspots.
“Thanks to Earthrangers, trophy poaching has steadily declined over the past five years, with elephant poaching going from a high of 120 elephants in 2012 to zero for (our) member conservation groups over the past four years. “It became,” he says.
Wall says the possibility of securely collecting and sharing data from various EarthRanger sites around the world is revolutionary.
“If organizations are doing joint patrols or species monitoring, for example, they can also share that information,” he says. “By storing information in EarthRanger, we can pull data from a variety of sites and combine it in ways that weren't possible before. This means we can analyze and report in ways that didn't exist before. It will be possible to create.
