By Miquel Garcia, EAG
The celebration of World Wildlife Day on March 3 began roughly a decade ago. The designation of the day was done at the 68th United Nations General Assembly. Each year we take a moment to both celebrate and raise awareness of the world’s fauna and flora and the steps conservation organizations take to ensure their long term survival. This year, World Wildlife Day is dedicated to “Exploring Digital Innovation in Wildlife Conservation”.
The world is rapidly changing, both through the environments we live in and the technology we use.
Digital technologies in particular are at the apex of today’s technological advancements. Digital technologies are systems developed to create, store, and manage data, on devices like smartphones, computers, the internet, and the like. Advanced digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Social Media are at the forefront of current global discourse. This year for World Wildlife Day we want to celebrate how digital innovation allows us to more effectively conserve endangered species around Antigua and Barbuda.
To conserve any species successfully, we need to understand several factors about their individuals and populations, their place in the ecosystem, and how they interact with the changing world. Science is data driven, and successful conservation is science based!
The more information we have collected about a species like the Critically Endangered Antiguan Racer, their ecosystem, and the environment, the more precise and effective our conservation strategies become.
For most, the first sign that a species is in trouble happens when we notice their numbers are lower than we remember. How do we know when individuals in the wild are disappearing? While it might be easy to remember the names of our precious pets or that one bird that visits us every now and again, how do we do it for animals in the wild?
One tried and true method we use for sea turtles around the world, and specifically within Antigua and Barbuda is through flipper tagging. By placing a metal name tag on individuals we can estimate their populations and infer behavior by seeing how frequently we interact with both the tagged and untagged individuals.
This method can easily be done on the nesting females that come from all over the Caribbean to lay their eggs on our beaches. However, working with sea turtles in the water is much more difficult, and potentially dangerous. To name individuals in water we can use innovative new methods like through the use of Artificial Intelligence. Programs using Artificial Intelligence can identify individuals by matching the unique patterns of their face or flipper scales, from any photo or video, from any source.
This means that both the effort conservation managers put in to capture and tag these individuals, and the stress these organisms face from engagement with humans are considerably reduced.
These digital advancements are not just limited to identifying individuals. They also help us to assess ecosystem health over time using Unmanned Aerial Systems aka drones, or satellites, or even identify new behaviours or document invasive species using technologies like camera or acoustic traps.
These technologies even assist us in the ever more important role of communicating our cause and inspiring the public to be actors of change and ambassadors for the environment.
Creating digital field trips to bring an outdoor adventure to primary and secondary school classrooms with our “Into The Wild” series on YouTube, or sharing stories and fun wildlife facts for Wildlife Wednesday on Instagram. These examples are all uses of digital technology for science, data collection, data analysis, and communication that we use at the Environmental Awareness Group (EAG).
This past World Wildlife Day gives us at the EAG a moment to celebrate our conservation victories through the successful ongoing conservation of the Antiguan Racer, the re-wilding and designation of Redonda as a protected area, and work to conserve Sea Turtles around our shores. We are, however, mindful that there is still a lot of work still left to be done. Through the adoption of new digital technologies, we aim to continue to manage our precious species in the most sustainable way possible.
