It\u2019s early morning in Sera Community Conservancy in Northern Kenya and sunlight beats down across this expansive semi-arid landscape. Birds calling and boots crunching are the only sounds for miles as a team led by Kenyan wildlife veterinarian Dr. Mukami Ruoro-Oundo carefully tracks white rhinos \u2014 the first of their kind to be found here in Samburu County. <\/p>\n
Once common in the area, by the early 1990s Northern Kenya\u2019s rhino population was decimated by poaching. But the country\u2019s black rhino population has more than doubled since 1989, and by December 2022 there were 1,900 black rhinos and white rhinos in total, according to Kenya Wildlife Services. <\/p>\n
Sera Conservancy has championed the country\u2019s community-led rhino conservation efforts. In 2015 it established East Africa\u2019s first community rhino sanctuary with the introduction of 10 critically endangered black rhinos. Today, that number has grown to 21 black rhinos which freely roam across 107 square kilometers (41 square miles) of designated sanctuary land, and in February 2024, they were joined by four white rhinos from the nearby Lewa Conservancy. <\/p>\n
As she searches on foot, Dr. Ruoro-Oundo spots two of the female white rhinos. One, called Sarah, looks heavily pregnant but as the vet creeps closer she notices something is very wrong. <\/p>\n
Mindful of not encroaching too long on the rhinos\u2019 territory and reluctant to intervene unnecessarily, she opts for a different approach; through a conservation technology tool called EarthRanger she can monitor Sarah\u2019s movements in real time from a distance. <\/strong> <\/p>\n Prior to translocation, each of the four white rhinos was fitted with a GPS tag in its horns and ears, which sends a real-time location to remote devices like mobile phones, or to the conservancy\u2019s operations center, where Dr. Ruoro-Oundo is able to monitor Sarah\u2019s location and movements. <\/p>\n Sparse internet connectivity means Dr. Ruoro-Oundo cannot get a clear signal from Sarah\u2019s transmitter but thankfully Sarah is not alone; a female rhino named Arot has never left her side and through Arot\u2019s transmitter Dr. Ruoro-Oundo can see that Sarah has barely moved in hours, suggesting her condition is deteriorating. By using a drone to take photos of her, the team is able to confirm that Sarah urgently needs help. <\/p>\n \u201cWe noticed she has a fecal impaction, it was quite huge and had made the rectal and vulvar area swollen,\u201d says Dr. Ruoro-Oundo. \u201cShe\u2019s in a lot of pain because she could not put down her tail, and you could see she was a bit sluggish, she really wanted to spend her time lying down. So in such a case we really need to intervene for her comfort, to relieve her of the distress and the pain.\u201d <\/p>\n An emergency intervention is immediately put into action, led by Kenya Wildlife Services and Sera Conservancy\u2019s management and rangers. Air, ground and additional veterinary support are mobilized within hours \u2014 potentially saving not only Sarah\u2019s life but that of her unborn calf too. <\/p>\n For Dr. Ruoro-Oundo, the key to safeguarding Kenya\u2019s wildlife is a balance between community and technology. <\/p>\n \u201cI think you cannot separate technology from conservation in the future,\u201d she says.\u201d The human element can never be removed, but technology will always come to assist where we cannot reach.\u201d <\/p>\n Now used in 70 countries, EarthRanger\u2019s story started in Kenya when co-founder Wall was researching elephants there. <\/p>\n \u201cIn about 2012, we had a real crisis with poaching in Kenya, so we wanted a way that we could pick up on elephants that were getting killed, and the sign for us was that the collar stopped moving for more than about five or six hours, which is the longest sort of period that an elephant rests for,\u201d he recalls. <\/p>\n \u201cSo I wrote the algorithm that could work out whether an elephant had stopped moving or not, and then (the collar) would send an SMS if it had. So that was kind of the beginning.\u201d <\/p>\n He adds that the system has evolved quite significantly since then, and Sarah is one of 9,000 animals \u2014 including elephants, lions, giraffe, tortoises, sea turtles and 1,200 rhinos \u2014 that EarthRanger is currently tracking in Kenya alone. <\/p>\n Wall says the system can integrate data from more than 100 different devices \u2014 \u201canything from elephant trackers to ear tags for rhino, to collars for lions, tail tags (for giraffes), devices that glue onto the shell of a turtle.\u201d <\/p>\n It can also receive information from sources such as vehicle trackers, satellites, and remote sensing alerts for things like deforestation and fire. \u201cIt\u2019s pulling it all into one platform, where it can be readily visualized, analyzed and then acted upon,\u201d Wall adds. \u201cAnd all of that\u2019s giving the operators and managers a bird\u2019s eye view of the situation as it\u2019s happening, with real-time tools.\u201d <\/p>\n According to the EarthRanger, all of these devices are designed to be lightweight, durable and inconspicuous ensuring they don\u2019t impact on the animals\u2019 natural behavior or cause them discomfort. For rhinos, Dr. Ruoro-Oundo says that attaching a tracker is the equivalent sensation of a human getting their ears pierced. <\/p>\n Samuel Lekimaroro, a wildlife protection manager for the Northern Rangelands Trust, which includes Sera Conservancy, uses this kind of data to live-track terrestrial and marine wildlife across 6.5 million hectares. For Lekimaroro it has become a powerful tool in translocating wildlife, data collection and security operations, including identifying hotspots for human-wildlife conflict. <\/p>\n \u201cThanks to EarthRanger, trophy poaching has been on a steady decline for the last five years, from a high of 120 elephants poached in 2012, to zero in the last four years in (our) member conservancies,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n Wall says its potential to securely collect and share data from different EarthRanger sites from across the world is revolutionary. <\/p>\n \u201cIf organizations are doing, say, joint patrolling, or monitoring of a species, then they can also share that information,\u201d he says. \u201cBy storing information on EarthRanger we can pull that data from different sites and combine it in ways that was never possible before. So it\u2019s really enabling the analysis and the reporting in a way that just never existed before.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s early morning in Sera Community Conservancy in Northern Kenya and sunlight beats down across this expansive semi-arid landscape. Birds calling and boots crunching are the only sounds for miles as a team led by Kenyan wildlife veterinarian Dr. Mukami Ruoro-Oundo carefully tracks white rhinos \u2014 the first of their kind to be found here <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3472,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} A global effort<\/h2>\n