How we can use technology to save wildlife
Habitat preservation should be given high priority since it is the most important single approach to protect entire ecosystems and many species simultaneously; however, the constant threat to habitat and wildlife populations and their potential annihilation makes their conservation especially challenging. Traditional methods of monitoring and recording schemes, undertaken by conservationists to capture evidence on wildlife presence, abundance and movement, have characteristically been labour-intensive endeavours. With traditional methods, such as capture-mark-recapture approaches or conventional survey methods, organisations depended on staff and volunteers, and hand-written logs for data storage. Although this reliance on such resources meant a certain degree of advantage over technological methods in terms of cost and material resource demands, it came with a number of limitations. For example challenges of scale due to limited spatial and temporal coverage and issues with recording, storage, reproduction and dissemination of data, traditional methods also required arguably intrusive human presence in spaces inhabited by the wildlife.
With advancement of technology the use of camera-traps and other passive sensors have enabled information to be collected without a high degree of human intervention. Organisations are now in a better position than before to observe the otherwise unobservable and more remotely collect extensive amounts of new types of data.
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