By: Frida Ruiz
As mentioned in the previous part of Tech in Conservation, there are many facets to conservation and the ways in which technology is involved. The first part of the series went through the process of reforestation and what tools are used to facilitate that, from utilizing handheld auger drills to create the holes to flying drones to scope the layout of the restoration site. However, it’s worth noting that reforestation is only one part of conservation and it’s just as important to focus on the biodiversity within the ecosystems.
Ensuring the species richness and evenness matches with the conditions prior to deforestation is essential to full restoration. The flora and fauna within an ecosystem can help with nutrient cycling, filtering the water systems, adding more organic content onto soil, reducing soil erosion, and serving as seed dispersers. Moreover, they serve as ecosystem health indicators. Without their presence, It’s impossible to maintain the ecosystem even after reforesting. Hence, ecologists dedicate time and resources into species conservation.
The main aspects of biodiversity conservation entail proper habitats, breeding conditions, and interspecies interactions. Thus, ecological practices like reforestation enable such conditions to occur as many species cannot grow their population without a developed habitat. However, it is difficult to tell if reforestation was successful for increasing biodiversity without measuring the outcomes.
Biodiversity monitoring allows for a quantitative way to determine species populations and types. The Biodiversity team will head to a reforestation site twice a year (during the wet and dry seasons) for 1.5 months, ensuring the tools are given enough time to collect data. While the team does observe and analyze plant biodiversity, much of this is already done by the reforestation team. Therefore, most of the efforts are geared towards animal biodiversity monitoring.
Traditional methods include transects and point counts, where ecologists and local community members document evidence of animals in a pre-defined area (including tracks, scat, calls, and visual observation of organisms).. While these methods are accurate when implemented correctly, they often are time consuming for the amount of data needed. Hence, new technology can help address some of those concerns and aid biodiversity monitoring, which will be explored in the following section.
Camera Traps
Camera Traps serve as a way to capture animals that are not commonly sighted or to obtain a more accurate abundance of a species. Most modern camera traps work by having their passive infrared sensor (PIR) send out beams that detect movement and heat signatures on a given landscape, indicating the presence of an animal. Subsequently, the camera will either take a picture or video, and the speed of when that occurs depends on the trigger speed (with most high quality cameras having a trigger speed of less than 0.5 seconds) (Naturespy.org). According to a publication in the Royal Society, “Camera traps were significantly more effective than other methods at detecting a large number of species (31%) and for generating detections of species (91%),” (Wearn & Glover-Kapfer, 2019). While camera traps are easy to set up in principle, there are a lot of intricacies that lead to poor recordings. Moving branches, high wind speeds, and dormant animals may lead to the camera not capturing what’s intended. Unfortunately, these errors are not noticed until the end of a biodiversity monitoring season, resulting in tedious data analysis. Thankfully, once learning how to use them, this is less common especially as they have become improved and more reliable.
2. Passive Acoustic Monitors
Passive Acoustic Monitors (PAM) detect a diverse set of sound waves through their microphones (or other sensors) to record the noise in said environment. These monitors are most commonly used for ornithological (bird) and oceanic research (those types utilize hydrophones and more complex sensors). The main advantages are easy deployment, noninvasiveness to the surrounding species, and its ability to capture 120+ hours of recordings. However, many terrestrial PAMs are newly developed technology, meaning a greater susceptibility to device errors and unreliability. Despite some technical issues, PAMs allow for continuous audio recording across many sampling points, which would be impractical with traditional approaches.
3. The MothBox
Designed by DINALAB, a jungle-tech prototyping studio in Panama which helps ecologists create customtools for research and conservation, the MothBox serves to monitor nocturnal insects (such as moths)which are time-consuming to detect using conventional methods. The device works by its light attracting the target species leading them to a sheet where then the camera automatically captures multiple shots of the sheet. The main components of the device are a Raspberry Pi (a mini computer), Ring LED lights, battery, an Arducam 64MP Autofocus Camera, and a UV attractant light. Currently, the device can run for 20 hours and can capture detailed images of the insects. The data is very useful to not only get a sense of the amount and types of nocturnal insect biodiversity, but AI modeling can be used to make more accurate accounts and trends of the night-flying insect population in an ecosystem. Some goals for future MothBox development are reducing costs, increasing the image quality and battery life, and increasing usability by non-experts. Dinalab has also been working on a standalone UV attractant light, the MothBeam. Despite the device being fairly new, it has been able to win grants (such as the WILDLABS Award) and has been able to have new iterations and updates.
Ecologists and conservation organizations using biodiversity monitoring tools look for technology that is scalable, cost effective, is able to monitor primary producers, insects, mammals, birds, and target taxonomic groups, and something that can be replicated & standardized. While each of these are not infallible and may not address every prerequisite mentioned, the ever expanding creation/improvement of these tools will significantly aid current conservation efforts. It’s incredible to see how much technology can branch out, with not only covering essentials like the ability to see and hear charismatic animals like monkeys and birds, but to also be able to monitor more obscure species (just as essential to the greater ecosystem) that were impossible to even think of how to track just a few years ago.
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