Poaching has become a serious problem in South Africa, with rhino poaching reaching crisis levels, says Laurence Smith, executive at Graphic Image Technologies.
Year-on-year increases in the number of rhinos killed for their horns, which are purported to have medicinal properties, are pushing these animals closer to extinction, despite increased anti-poaching activities.
These initiatives are faced with a number of challenges, including limited resources as well as the vast areas of open land that need to be monitored. Technology provides the ultimate solution in the form of thermal imaging cameras with analytics capabilities.
These will enable conservation ventures and national parks to effectively monitor park perimeters as well as open grasslands for suspicious activities, helping to catch poachers before they can cause more harm.
South Africa is home to an estimated 90% of the world’s population of white rhinos, and around 40% of the global population of black rhinos. Both of these species have been placed on the International Union of Conservation Nature (IUCN) Red List, with black rhinos listed as critically endangered and white rhinos classified as near threatened.
Statistics around the number of rhinos being poached are concerning, with 668 rhinos killed in 2011, 1004 killed in 2013 and numbers for 2014 at 695 as of 17 August. In spite of increased awareness of poaching and efforts to curb these activities, poachers remain a major threat.
Anti-poaching initiatives aim to monitor conservation sites and national parks and deploy anti-poaching personnel to deal with intruders. However, a lack of resources combined with the sheer size of the area to be monitored makes this an almost impossible task.
To put this into perspective, the Kruger National Park stretches 19 485 square kilometres – almost eight times the size of the Cape Town metro and nearly 12 times the size of Johannesburg city – and this is only one of South Africa’s national parks.
The increase in the number of rhinos being poached clearly shows that traditional anti-poaching measures are no longer effective; they only put under-armed and inadequately trained rangers at risk. The only hope to save the rhino from extinction is for anti-poaching personnel to apprehend the poachers before they strike. The aim is to monitor conservation sites and national parks in order to prevent poachers entering the land, effectively stopping them in their tracks. However, in the thick brush of South Africa’s game reserves, adequate surveillance on the ground is very difficult, unless the correct technology is used.
To combat the militia tactics and equipment of the poachers, military specification CCTV thermal imaging system with analytics provide the solution. Thermal cameras offer the benefit of showing heat signatures rather than a traditional picture, which means that day or night, whatever the weather, the image recorded will be the same. When combined with an advanced monitoring application, this technology enables anti-poaching protection services to be one step ahead in the fight to protect these endangered species.
Thermal cameras with analytics enable users to create parameters that signal an alert for specific criteria. This negates the need to have a person constantly monitoring each video feed, which is a process that is prone to human error and is not particularly accurate or effective.
For example, specific images can trigger an alert, as the analytics can differentiate between people and different animals, over long distances, both during the day and at night. This is highly effective for perimeter monitoring, to prevent poachers from even getting in to protected areas.
The range of the cameras varied from 50m up to one kilometre, depending on the density of brush cover as well as deviations from straight line of sight. Perimeters can be effectively monitored by overlapping cameras, ensuring there are no gaps in the camera coverage.
To enable the monitoring of open landscapes, cameras can be mounted in clusters, facing in every direction on a six-metre pole, with a complete solution including solar panel, battery and a GSM modem that enables video to be broadcast back to central control. By linking the analytics to this solution, alerts can be triggered if any suspicious activity is sighted, to ensure that poachers are apprehended even if they slip past the perimeter.
Effective monitoring is key in the fight against rhino poaching. Using thermal imaging cameras with advanced detection capability can offer a far more proactive solution to stopping poachers in their tracks. Technology not only helps to protect the lives of the rangers, it can also mean the difference between pre-empting the death of a rhino, or hunting for the killers after the fact, when it is already too late.
