Posted on 19 February
2013 | By Dr Chistiaan Van Der Hoeven WWF-NL
I'm a biologist, with a Ph.D. in park management
and wildlife surveys – counting stuff. But
I'm originally an ethologist, so animal
behavior. I have done a lot of research
in Africa on monkeys and on elephants, which
made me love those species and the African
continent. They say you can never get Africa
out of your blood once you've been there.
I don’t do the counting myself any more,
which is a pity because it’s nice to run
around in the forest.
Today, we don't know
enough about how many elephants there are.
The problem is, with the current poaching
crisis going on, the priority is to save
the elephants. If you talk to people in
the field they say, “Listen, I don’t care
how many elephants there are. They are being
slaughtered by the thousands, so I am not
going to spend money and time counting elephants
while they are being slaughtered.” But how
can you protect what you can’t even count?
Surveying is actually an essential part
of protecting.
For some species, we
have sophisticated monitoring – the rhino
DNA database, for example. We can really
see what’s going on with rhinos. But with
other species we know so little. We don’t
know how many gorillas are there in eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo. We have no
clue. We need this information, or we could
lose a population before we ever knew it
existed. So counting is really important.
Part of the challenge
is that it’s extremely difficult to count
animals in dense forest. Another factor
is the sheer scale of the landscapes we’re
trying to survey. This is why we need a
mix of methodologies – old fashioned and
high tech.
I developed with my
previous professor a partnership with the
local people that live in these forests.
They know exactly what is in the forests.
They don’t care about population densities,
but they do know that the elephants are
there, or the apes. And they know if there
used to be more. So I developed a way of
interviewing community members and translating
what they said as a way to estimate how
many animals live in a particular area in
the forest. They know perfectly well whether
numbers have gone down or up based on their
daily observations. If you are not sure,
then you ask someone from the older generation
to come by, and they will know.
On the other end of
the spectrum, we now have access to cutting-edge
conservation drones. These “eyes in the
sky” let us look for things like fires from
poachers camps. When you fly over the rainforest,
you can't see anything but the canopy trees,
but you can see very far. A wisp of smoke
stands out. This information is vital when
deciding where to send anti-poaching patrols.
You can’t be everywhere at once – you need
some intelligence. By sending a drone up,
you can point the patrol in the right direction
and save a lot of time and money.
Drones also can be useful
for counting animals. By gathering better
data we can make smarter management plans.
We won’t save animals by law enforcement
alone. We need that, but we need science,
too.
