Sir David Attenborough is the grand master behind epic nature documentaries like Planet Earth and Blue Planet. His productions take us deep into entirely new worlds that few humans have ever visited. His next project will do that even more convincingly, powered by the amazing virtual reality powers of Oculus Rift.
Humans don’t exactly have a stellar record when it comes to environmental stewardship, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t trying. Numerous projects around the world are working to rebuild lost habitats, protect vital wildlife highways, and regenerate lost populations. Here are a few man-made structures built on behalf of our four-footed brethren.
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On highway medians, atop old landfills, in backyards—these are some of the places a monarch butterfly revival could begin. The yearly migration of monarchs from the northern U.S. and Canada to the warmer environs of Mexico was once a spectacular sight, and a now a rare one. Their numbers have dwindled. There’s no single cause, but a major one is habitat loss.
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Have ever sat mere yards from a herd of elephants as they drank at a watering hole? What about had one brush by just inches from you? Or then tried to photograph the whole thing? No? Well, it’s a good job Greg du Toit did, then.
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Remote cameras are useful to wildlife conservationists, but their closed (or non-existent) networking limits the opportunities for tracking animals around the clock. The Instant Wild project’s cameras, however, are designed to rely on the internet for help. Whenever they detect movement, they deliver imagery to the public through Iridium’s satellite network. Anyone watching the cameras through the Instant Wild iOS app or website becomes an impromptu zoologist; viewers can identify both animals and poachers that dedicated staff might miss. Maintenance also isn’t much of an issue, as each unit is based on a Raspberry Pi computer that can run for long periods on a single battery. The Zoological Society of London currently operates these satellite cameras in Kenya, but there are plans underway to expand their use to the Antarctica, the Himalayas, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
Filed under: Cameras, Internet
Source: Cambridge Consultants, Edge of Existence
It turns out there’s an uneasy jungle truce between tigers and elephants. Tigers don’t try to attack and eat full-grown pachyderms, and the elephants make sure not to trample the big cats. And it’s this unofficial agreement that the BBC used to its advantage to capture the first footage of newborn tiger cubs in the wild. More »
Most of the drone-related news these days may focus on military or police use, but those are far from the only applications for the unmanned aerial vehicles. Case in point: the World Wildlife Fund, which has now received a $5 million grant from Google’s Global Impact Awards program to fund UAVs designed to monitor endangered species. Details on the drones themselves remain light, but the WWF says they’ll be used to detect poachers and tagged animals on the ground, and then relay that information to a command center and mobile law enforcement units. What’s more, while that initial funding will only provide something of a testbed, the WWF says it’s focusing on “easily-replicable technologies,” with its ultimate goal being to create an “efficient, effective network that can be adopted globally.”
[Image credit: WWF]
Via: BBC News
Source: WWF
We all worry from time to time about having our tech stolen. But when Ed Hetherington travelled to Zimbabwe for a wildlife photography adventure, he probably didn’t expect to have his camera snatched by a lion. More »
This stunning picture of an alligator looks like it’s been photoshopped. Amazingly, it’s not been manipulated at all—which is why it’s snagged a prize in the UK Natural History Museum’s wildlife photographer of the year competition. More »
Wildlife photography can be grueling, tedious work, but the payoff is sometimes you get something as amazing as this British Wildlife Photography Awards winner. It’s of gannets (birds), diving into the sea off the coast of north Scotland. And it’s breathtaking. More »
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