Kenya: GSM Radio Tracking Canopies the Wildlife
By Eric sande
NAIROBI---Kenya is known to be one of Africa’s home of the Safari. For over a hundred years Kenya has attracted adventurers and romantics from all over the globe. This has been the setting of some of history’s greatest adventure tales. This is the home of Out of Africa, a place where setting out on an adventure into the wilderness became an age old tradition.
The desires of the Safari live on today. The romance of sundown drinks, of evenings around a campfire and nights under canvas with the distant roar of a lion in the African night can still be found in Kenya.
The lure of Kenya has always been the same, the sheer variety of landscape, wildlife, human cultures and experience. No other African country can boast such diversity within its borders.
The perturbing issue for the conservationist and the wildlife fanatics, is the raising numbers of poachers who kill the wild life with aims of getting ivory. The ivory is later sold to the middle east. This trend has left the world with a limited number of different species of animals in our game reserves.
A project dubbed ‘Push to Talk on Cellular’ (PoC), has brought together Safaricom Ltd as the lead organization, Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association (GSMA) Development Fund, Wireless Zeta Telecomunicaciones (Wireless ZT), Nokia, the Nokia Siemens Networks, and local conservation organizations.
The early warning system combines the functionality of a walkie-talkie with a mobile phone. It enables communication between two individuals, or a group of people, and is particularly useful in connecting a user group.
The communications manager at Kenya wildlife Service (KWS), Paul Udoto said, “the data collected helps to identify the season when wild animals migrate near human settlements”.
Human-wildlife conflict has resulted in the deaths of more than 200 lions in the Amboseli and Tsavo ecosystems since 2001.Countrywide, the lion population dropped from an estimated 2,749 in 2002 to 2,280 in 2004 and 2000 animals by 2009, according to the KWS.
A research and conservation group that is reaching unprotected areas to save the remaining lions and other predators, is working alongside KWS to address the conflict.
Under its Lion Guardians project, the organisation is working with local communities to improve their livestock enclosures, change herding practices and educate them on lion movements, through an early warning system.
Lions are often killed through poisoning, use of spears or guns in revenge for attacks on livestock. Conservationists in Kenya say carbofuran is the most widely used pesticide to kill wildlife such as lions and leopards. Due to its high toxicity, carbofuran is not permitted for use in agriculture in the European Union and the US where it is manufactured.
“The Amboseli National park lost 80 per cent of its herbivores to the drought as the worst in 26 years”, said KWS spokesperson Kentice Tikolo.
The black rhino, Diceros bicornis, has declined across Africa in both numbers and range distribution. Its numbers plummeted from about 65,000 in 1970 to about 10,000 in the early 1980s. Although the rate of decline has reduced since late 1980s, the situation is still serious in all areas where the black rhino is still found naturally. Poaching for the horn has been, and continues to be, the major cause of the black rhino population decline. Currently, the total population of black rhino in Africa is estimated at 3100, according to African Rhino Specialist Group.
The KWS has newly adopted a new management plan for rhino conservation in Kenya. The broad goals of the current strategy are to enhance rapid population growth of the black rhino population in Kenya through increased attention to biological management, in addition to law enforcement. Specifically, the goal is to increase the black rhino numbers by at least 5 per cent per annum and reach a confirmed total of 500 rhinos by 2005, 650 rhinos by 2010 and 1000 rhinos by 2020.
To facilitate realisation of the wildlife service mission, the programme has installed a database of rhino numbers and information. This will improve on monitoring of the rhinos, both for security and biological research and management. The rhino staff were also trained on radio collar assemblage, radio tracking, use of Global Positioning System (GPS), receivers and rhino post release management.
State-of-the-art miniaturized radio-collar animal tracking tags using GSM mobile phone technology, for monitoring endangered wildlife in Kenya has been a success story for elephants in Kenya.
Save the Elephants pioneered GPS tracking of elephants. The deployment of this new technology helped the institution to acquire highly detailed spatial data, which are now being used for landscape and conservation planning in the Ewaso watershed in the Samburu, Laikipia, and Isiolo Districts of Northern Kenya. The innovative of the project attracted a great deal of interest from the media and won an award from the GSM Association, in the field of “Mobility in the Environment”. KWS now intends to lift the process to an entirely new level by applying the lessons learnt to a wider multi-species context.
The elephant movements recorded by collars thus far have been integrated into a grid analysis system across the Ewaso ecosystem from which it was possible to define priority areas for conservation. The information is successfully helping identify migratory corridors and the connectivity of districts, safe havens and various land units used by elephants. It is assisting in the planning of farming areas and is informing policy on fencing, poaching and animal reintroduction. The result is a reduction in the risk of human/wildlife conflict.
From the tracking research some exciting findings emerged. KWS detected unusual movements in the elephant population during the severe drought of early 2006 that alerted management to a gross shift in the range of some elephant families from Samburu and Buffalo Springs national reserves to an area South East of Isiolo. This rare movement had not been recorded before, and highlights the effect of short-term environmental perturbations that have considerable importance in the planning process.
Another highly original outcome was from combining the GPS tracking data with isotope tracking of diet in elephant tail hairs. This was used to reconstruct the history of what the elephants ate during the year. This allowed KWS to understand the feeding strategies of the Samburu elephants and how some had taken to raiding crops to supplement their diet in areas outside protected areas, as this could be traced in the isotopic signature along the length of the tail hair.