Technology to monitor the natural world

Technology is helping environmentalists monitor flora and fauna much better now.

 Technology to monitor the natural world

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• The story: Remarkable things are happening in the natural world. Well, the man-made world is now monitoring it much better to discover "remarkable things"!
• Hearing the Cicadas: The new forest Cicada had not been seen in seven years. The insect is the only cicada native to the British Isles. It spends 7-8 years underground as a nymph, then emerges, reproduces and dies within six weeks. During its short adult life, it produces a high-pitched hiss that would make it easier to detect, were it not at the upper limit of human hearing. Its call is audible to children but not to most adults. But it can be picked up by smartphone microphones. This led to the invention of AudioMoth, an “acoustic logger” that can be set to listen for a particular sound and record it.

1. It includes a smartphone microphone, a memory card and a basic processing chip, powered by three AA batteries. To date, some 30,000 AudioMoths have been scattered around the globe.
2. A smaller version has just been launched and is being incorporated into an experiment to study how African carnivores are responding to warmer temperatures by monitoring the sounds they make, such as panting.

• Explosion: This is just one example of the use of sensors to monitor ecosystems. Such devices are now all across forests and national parks, attached to trees or the backs of animals. As well as recording environmental data, such as temperature or humidity, they also monitor the nature, number and movement of living things.

1. Motion-activated camera traps - These have captured images of the elusive snow leopards.
2. Microphones - These monitor bat colonies, known to harbour diseases that can jump to humans, and coral reefs, whose crackling sounds are thought to broadcast their location to nearby fish.
3. Radio tags - These, attached to animals, capture data about their behaviour as they go about their daily lives. The Icarus project has around 5,000 lightweight tags, weighing just five grams each, attached to animals on all continents. The sensors track the animals’ movements to within a few metres, along with the local temperature, pressure and humidity—all of which is relayed back to researchers via an antenna on the International Space Station.

• Mobile industry helped: Technologies from the smartphone industry, including batteries, cameras, microphones and chips, have helped make such sensors smaller, cheaper and more capable. Before the Icarus project developed its five-gram sensors, most radio tags weighed 15-20g. A future version will reduce the weight to just one gram, allowing the tags to be attached to even smaller creatures.
• Machine learning: It has revolutionised the task of scanning through the resulting sound recordings, images and other readings, many of which are false alarms. Conservationists can use AI to do the recognising for them. Big tech firms, including Google and Microsoft, are also getting involved. Wildlife Insights, a collaboration of seven large conservation organisations, with support from Google, is trying to create a single space where all camera traps will log their data (its database currently counts 16,652 camera-trap projects in 44 countries). Its machine-learning models can filter out the blank images that make up the majority of camera-trap pictures and identify hundreds of species in the remaining ones.
• Local processing: As sensors get smarter, they are increasingly able to process data themselves—at the network edge, rather than centrally in the cloud—which reduces the need to transmit or store data unnecessarily. If sensors are networked, they can also raise the alarm right away if they spot something important.
• Ways to monitor: Putting devices on the ground, or attached to animals, is not the only way to monitor ecosystems. It can also be done from the air or from space. Regional, and even global, snapshots can be generated using instruments mounted on planes or by scanning the Earth using satellites. The dozens of Earth-observation instruments orbiting the planet can collect information about land use, detect blooms in oceanic plankton, monitor emissions from forest fires, and track oil spills or the break-up of polar ice sheets. But satellite imagery can be flawed. Viewed from above, some tropical tree plantations can look like native forest. New tools to assess forests’ health are becoming available, the most important of which is LIDAR — a technique which is similar to radar except that it employs infrared laser light instead of radio waves, and can map out spaces in high resolution and in three dimensions.
• Summary: The hope for future lies in the fact that as technology gets smaller and cheaper, conservation will be easier.

 

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