Unlocking Conservation Technology

[00:00:00] Alex Re: Hello. Welcome to On Wildlife. I'm your host, Alex Re. On this podcast, we bring the wild to you. We take you on a journey into the life of a different animal every week, and I guarantee you you're going to come out of here knowing more about your favorite animal than you did before. World Wildlife Day is coming up on Sunday, March 3rd, so I decided that we were in need of a special episode to help us celebrate.

[00:00:27] Joining me today is Colby Loucks, the Vice President and Deputy Lead for World Wildlife Fund's Wildlife Program. He also runs their Wildlife Technology Innovation Lab, where they use technology to come up with solutions to wildlife conservation problems. You're going to learn about a bunch of different types of technology in this episode and how it's used to help animals across the globe.

[00:00:52] We'll even learn about some cool things that Colby and his team are doing with artificial intelligence, which is quickly rising in popularity. So let's get into the episode and learn more about Colby.

[00:01:22] Hi Colby. How you doing?

[00:01:23] Colby Loucks: Good. How are you?

[00:01:25] Alex Re: I'm great. Thanks so much for coming on to the podcast. I really appreciate it and I can't wait to learn more about you and what you do at the World Wildlife Fund.

[00:01:35] Colby Loucks: Yeah, looking forward to it.

[00:01:36] Alex Re: Great. So can you just tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started in wildlife conservation?

[00:01:43] Colby Loucks: Sure. Yeah. As a kid, I was outdoors a lot, went camping with my dad and hiking the Appalachian Trail. So it was just, had a lot of just positive outdoor experiences. I also had an amazing biology teacher in high school, and that led me to be a biology major in college. Took some ecology courses, so I went to grad school for ecosystem management, and then got introduced to this program or this field of study called Geographic Information Systems, which is called GIS.

[00:02:12] It's just a fancy way of saying, or showing ways to use maps to do analyses and try to find answers. And it's very spatial. And that's the way my brain worked. And once I saw that, I was, I was off and running. That was what actually led to my first job at World Wildlife Fund.

[00:02:29] Alex Re: Wow. That's awesome. And that's a great, just hearing that a great teacher changed the trajectory of your life because I used to be a biology teacher. So that warms my heart.

[00:02:41] Colby Loucks: No, yeah, it was great. I mean, there's more towards the, uh, biology of, of people and not as much as the environment. This is back, let's see here, that would have been the eighties, give how old I am. But, uh, but, um, I, I agree. I think a really good teacher can set a course for someone's future and yeah, that's awesome. Biology teachers are the best.

[00:03:02] Alex Re: That's great. Thank you. And you're now the vice president and deputy lead of the World Wildlife Fund's wildlife program. Could you talk about your role within the organization?

[00:03:14] Colby Loucks: Yeah, sure. So our focus, um, on our wildlife team is to conserve wildlife and their habitat, uh, around the world.

[00:03:22] A lot of our works in Africa, Asia, and, uh, summit South America, uh, a Latin hotels working with communities who are live right beside the wildlife areas, oftentimes to, uh, stopping poaching and trafficking of wildlife, which has been a. One of the major drivers of wildlife loss. I also lead our technology program.

[00:03:42] So how can we use technology in Innovative ways to also conserve wildlife. So we have a lot of interesting things across the globe.

[00:03:51] Alex Re: That's great And I'd love to start talking about some of that technology that you're using. So you're using wireless technology to track elephants. Can you talk about the methodology behind that and why it's important to track elephants in the first place?

[00:04:07] Colby Loucks: Yeah, this is some really new tech that, uh, we just test, I just started piloting in August. So just about six months ago from the recording of this. And, uh, the technology is going to, I'll say it. It's an awful acronym. It's called LoRaWAN. Which stands for Long Range Wide Area Network. Um, and you don't need to remember it, except, or your listeners, except that essentially, the best comparison I can have is, it's like your home's Wi Fi, with two really, really big differences.

[00:04:38] The first one is, your Wi Fi can maybe get around your house, maybe not even, depending on how, how it's set up. LoRa, which is a short for LoRaWAN, can go about 10 or 15 miles. Now the trade off is, well, you can stream movies, send photos, stream, blah, blah. This one, to be able to send information so far, I can only send small packets of information, like GPS coordinates.

[00:05:03] And, so then we were able to capitalize on that, and we developed with a partner called SmartParks, these collars that you can put on elephants, that would send GPS information to these LoRa, they're essentially like, they're routers, like they're as big as your router. And we put them up on towers. And so, uh, this, uh, pilot we did was in, uh, Zambia, outside of Kuthuli National Park.

[00:05:25] We put a bunch of these, uh, little router gateways up, these LoRa gateways, and essentially set up a, a private network. Just like, almost like your home Wi Fi is a private network. And we put ten of these collars on orphaned elephants. Another one of our partners, called Game Rangers International, has an orphaned elephant release facility right there.

[00:05:43] What they do is they're, oftentimes, they're, they're juveniles. They're small. They're moms that maybe have been poached. A human wildlife conflict, died for other reasons. And so what the focus of this elephant release facility is to, is to slowly introduce them to the wild. And so they let them go out, they kind of watch them and see where they go, and they come back and protect them at night.

[00:06:06] And then one day, as they're older, they just go out and They never come back. They integrate with the wild herds. And so, as they're in this process, they really wanted to know, where are these elephants going, or are they, which herd are they with? And so, that's where we stepped up with these Laura elephant collars.

[00:06:24] And, uh, so far it's going pretty well. And being able to track the elephants, making sure they don't come into conflict with people, if there's any issues. These are, you know, orphans, so sometimes they might have some. Some trouble with wild elephants. So it's being able to make sure we can conserve.

[00:06:40] Alex Re: Wow. That's really interesting. And I'm assuming those, those collars must be pretty, pretty large.

[00:06:47] Colby Loucks: You know, actually compared to like, so the traditional way of doing this is using satellite collars. I'm holding my hand up. You won't be able to see that, but there's about half the size of satellite collars. And that's because satellite collars are what they, they, they say they are.

[00:07:03] They send a signal. Up to the satellite in space and then come back down and that takes a lot more battery power. So ultimately what's making these smaller is they have, need a lot less battery power to send it essentially 10, 15 kilometers away. And so they can be half the size of traditional collars.

[00:07:20] Also half the weight so it's not as much of a burden. It's also like your Wi Fi network so we can talk to these things. We can be like, hey, where are you? Or you're giving us a signal every 15 minutes. Why don't you give us a signal every five minutes? Cause we're going to come try to find out where you are versus like traditional collars, like GPS collars, you make it one signal or two signals a day.

[00:07:40] So, uh, yeah, there's a lot of pluses in this new technology.

[00:07:43] Alex Re: That's really interesting. And also another technology. is thermal cameras, and can you talk about how they were used to catch poachers in the Maasai Mara?

[00:07:54] Colby Loucks: Yeah. So the Maasai Mara is, is in Kenya. When you watch the classic scenes of Africa, these big rolling plains, that's the Maasai Mara.

[00:08:02] And so about eight years ago, myself and some of our, my colleagues went to the Maasai, and in 2015, 16 was about the height of poaching for elephants and rhinos in Africa. It was quite bad, just as bad as it's been in decades. And we went out to the rangers, and we were like, Hey man, what's going on? Is there any tech that we could help you with?

[00:08:23] And they said, well, here's what, here's the deal is. Most of the poaching happens at night, and our flashlights can see, what, 10, 20 feet, 20 yards or so, maybe 30 feet. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack in these big rolling plains in the Maasai Mara. So if you can help us find the poachers at night, that would be super cool.

[00:08:39] So we went back, and we, my colleague Eric Becker ended up finding these thermal cameras. So, uh, this U. S. company called FLIR. makes these thermal cameras. Traditionally, they're used to protect hardened sites, dams, nuclear facilities, things like that. And we said, hey, you know what? These, these are, these cameras are thermal.

[00:08:58] Thermal detects heat. It doesn't need any light. So they're perfect for using in the middle of night. They can see. So what if we put one of these cameras on top of one of the Ranger vehicles? on top of a pan tilt so it zooms like you're playing a game boy or something. And so they would go out just at sunset, set up a place where they think the poachers would be coming.

[00:09:17] Maybe there's animals in front of us, you know, and so it was highly successful. So these cameras can see one to two miles. So we went from allowing Rangers to see like 30 feet to having a two mile radius around this truck. And yeah, and it was highly successful. The poaching was reduced. The wildlife was saved.

[00:09:37] It also allows the Rangers who have to try to catch these poachers to know is it one person or seven people? They knew what they're getting in with. So it reduced the potential conflict. So that is a really cool example that I can think of that we've been leading and kind of pioneering in Africa.

[00:09:54] Alex Re: Yeah, that, that's really awesome. So I'm sure that saved a lot of, a lot of animals lives. So that's great. The thermal cameras were also used to track one of the last black rhinos. Could you talk about that?

[00:10:08] Colby Loucks: Yeah. So another area where we focused on was putting these long range thermal cameras in, in some parts in Kenya, along the perimeters, a lot of illegal intrusions of the poachers were trying to come in.

[00:10:21] And so we put up a, essentially a trip line of, of these thermal cameras. Hooked together that cover the entire perimeter of the park and again in these times of high poaching pressure Which still exist and these are actually pretty cool. These cameras we added an AI to it So we basically trained the cameras to detect humans as well as rhinos and elephants lions zebras So anytime they're along the edge of the park if a human walked through it would send an alert to the Rangers It'd be like hey camera three just had an alert and they would look at it And then they would be able to send some rangers.

[00:10:59] And these parks are chock full of black rhinos. Kenya has the second highest population of black rhinos after South Africa. So it's super important for endangered species. And these guys were getting poached. And so we caught several poachers that way. And rhino poaching, and elephant to a certain extent as well, is mostly being driven by a demand out of Asia.

[00:11:21] So these were like poaching gangs. They weren't locals. It wasn't for local consumption. It wasn't. These were like hitman elite for rhinos. So we were catching these guys. That was, that's also pretty cool.

[00:11:33] Alex Re: That's, that's really interesting. And I'm, I'm assuming with the advancement of AI, you can kind of start to use this in different ways for animal conservation.

[00:11:44] Colby Loucks: You know, this is an exciting time. If you're into conservation and into technology, uh, it's super exciting times. Uh, uh, sometimes. Like, if I were coming up as a, a youngster nowadays, I would be totally in this field because with AI, batteries, cloud computing, all these different sensors are out there, whether it's audio sensors or the FLIR, I mean, it's almost the sky's the limit, however creative you can be to try to find animals or protect animals. There's probably some possibilities out there. So yeah,

[00:12:14] Alex Re: That's great. And are there any technologies that you're really excited about that maybe are just starting to be implemented?

[00:12:23] Colby Loucks: Yeah, there is one I think has so much promise. Uh, it's called environmental DNA. We call it eDNA. Environmental DNA is essentially DNA.

[00:12:32] So you and I, if we were walking on, going for a hike and we were walking through, let's say the mountains of Pennsylvania, cause that's where I'm from. We would shed DNA just walking like just happens and all animals do that as well as plants. And so what we've found is if you just go to the bottom of a river that has like a watershed and run water through some filters and then do some fancy pants DNA analysis, spending an afternoon will tell you is it'll give you a list of hundreds or all the species in that watershed.

[00:13:04] And that would be way more efficient in terms of time and money than other traditional ways, such as. It's putting up camera traps or audio traps or walking around and doing transects. So what this can do is tell you amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, everything that's there in an afternoon of, you know, collecting of DNA through a water filter of some sort.

[00:13:29] So that holds a lot of promise for massive amounts of sampling for wildlife. Also, other rare wildlife, like the Sumatran rhino, super rare, only a couple hundred left. You can put out a hundred camera traps out there and not find it. It just, it's just hard, but you could possibly with eDNA in an afternoon, determine if there's an, uh, a Sumatran rhino in your watershed.

[00:13:52] So that one holds super great promise. DNA in general, we're also doing another version of DNA analysis where scraping the elephant poop dung, if you want to be super techie. So scraping elephant dung. And then again, doing some fancy pants DNA analysis, we can tell if they're related from like country A to country B.

[00:14:12] So between Botswana, let's say, and Zambia. If they're related, that means those animals used to migrate back and forth. So you can almost find migrations that may not be happening now because humans have now maybe built a road there and stopped the migration. But you can almost see and find where these migrations are through the DNA analysis.

[00:14:31] So we're doing a lot of cool things. So again, if I was like a. Young person getting a PhD coming up through, uh, would be maybe in this space too.

[00:14:39] Alex Re: That is absolutely insane. And the first one, I can imagine, like, there's been a lot of times where we've thought an animal to be extinct, and then find it 20 years later in the wild. So that could really almost eliminate that problem.

[00:14:54] Colby Loucks: Another colleague of mine found an extinct, or extirpated, which is basically means it's maybe not extinct, but it's not been seen in that place for like super long time. In Myanmar, they did this in Myanmar or Burma, and they, yeah, they found several species that are like, we didn't know these species were in this country. So, exactly right. That's a good observation.

[00:15:12] Alex Re: That is really cool.

[00:15:14] Some of this technology is unbelievable. Now, before we hear more about Colby's view of wildlife conservation Let's take a little break.

[00:15:33] Time for today's trivia question. In what year did the United Nations first declare that March 3rd would be World Wildlife Day?

[00:15:51] The answer is december of 2013, so the first official World Wildlife Day would have been in 2014. Now, let's get back into the interview.

[00:16:10] How has your perspective of wildlife conservation changed from the time that you started working at WWF to now?

[00:16:18] Colby Loucks: Yeah, good question. You know, when I first started, I think a lot of the work was about where the where of conservation, where are the biodiversity hotspots? Where are the remaining forests?

[00:16:28] Where do animals migrate? And while the where is still important. I think now a lot of it is about the how of conservation. So like, how do we conserve those biodiversity hotspots? How can we more efficiently measure and find biodiversity? How can we remove plastics from the ocean? How do we switch to renewable energy?

[00:16:49] So I feel like, for me, that's where it's come back from just trying to catalog where it is. Although, eDNA still is needed to catalog where things are because a lot of the planet does not know what biodiversity they have. It's more about the how, and that's also quite challenging too.

[00:17:07] Alex Re: Yeah, definitely. That brings up its own sort of issues.

[00:17:11] Colby Loucks: Yeah, I mean, essentially, probably that's why WWF exists at some level, right? So like, how, how can we help solve these problems and these answers? So anyways, for me, I think that's what I've seen. And 20 years has It's gone from, you know, we have an iPhone now that's in your, in your pocket perhaps, or some other smartphone that's going to be probably significantly faster than the fastest computer on earth in the year 2000, right?

[00:17:39] So like the computing power and the ability to use AI and that's growing like leaps and bounds is also just, that wasn't even a thought process back in the 90s.

[00:17:50] Alex Re: Yeah, absolutely. And I know there's tons of stuff to talk about. Maybe some of the main actions that humans are taking that have the largest negative impact on the ecosystems, and what can we do to stop these things from happening?

[00:18:06] Colby Loucks: Yeah, well, the two big drivers of biodiversity loss and loss of wildlife is loss of habitat or the degradation of habitat, places where they live, and poaching or over exploitation. Again, Super big word for saying we're taking too many of them out of, off the earth. So for example, classic bit of work that we're focused on is trying to reduce bycatch.

[00:18:31] So you're out there fishing, you have these big fishing fleets, and they're focusing on one, but they get a couple sharks, and those sharks are bycatch, they die through the methods of fishing, and it adds up. So we're talking about millions of animals every year. Sea turtles, etc. So, you know, there are ways to do fishing or fishing methods or to reduce bycatch They're out there.

[00:18:56] So looking at food labels to see if it's like MSC certified or things like that I think just educating yourself be creative about how you go about making your purchase I think purchase power for all of us is another way that you can control The demand, the other side of it is most of the habitat being lost now is being cut down to put in food systems.

[00:19:19] You know, a systemic change of how food's produced, what you buy is an important thought. These are big issues. I guess maybe more at home, I would say, is trying to reduce food waste. You know, eat what you buy. Recycle or maybe compost if you don't eat it.

[00:19:34] Alex Re: Yeah, absolutely. And there's just so many things that go into What you just said, habitat loss could be the climate change and building new developments and like you said, food production. So there's just so many things that go into it.

[00:19:51] Colby Loucks: Yeah, yeah, you said climate change and appropriately. So I mean, it's an important issue that is affecting wildlife. And so we're seeing, and even in, even here and affecting us, you know, droughts. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, more severe weather, and that also impacts wildlife, especially the droughts.

[00:20:09] So then you have droughts causing, you know, massive die offs of wildlife and things. So things you can do to reduce our emissions would be also a path forward.

[00:20:21] Alex Re: Yeah, definitely. And is there any way that people at home can use technology in order to help with animal conservation?

[00:20:30] Colby Loucks: Yeah. As I mentioned, one of the main drivers is Illegal poaching or overexploitation of wildlife, and we've noticed, and another one of my colleagues has led the charge in this in their respect is, especially during COVID, a lot of the trade of wildlife went from like brick and mortar stores where like you show up, you know, maybe in an alley or a dodgy pet store someplace that's illegal to do, has moved online.

[00:21:00] So now, through the proliferation of social media companies and other ways of buying and selling online, that's like, you know, you can go to almost any of these and find ways to buy and sell things. Well, people are buying and selling illegal wildlife. The illegal wildlife trade has basically exploded on the internet and on social media.

[00:21:20] So, that would be a place where, you know, if you see that kind of actions, you know, one, don't, don't buy, don't purchase. But there's also ways increasingly of how you can help report that and to that end we set up this consortium, a lot of NGOs and like over 45 social media companies called nwildlifetraffickingonline.

[00:21:40] org. And that is a consortium where all of, a lot of these like Instagram, Facebook, like all the ones you would probably know about. have committed to bringing it down and removing any ads for illegal wildlife. So if you can, there's a process where you can help report that. Yeah. So that would be one way.

[00:21:57] Alex Re: And I think going off of that with the illegal wildlife trade, it could be something that you see that you don't really think anything of like people posting videos of themselves having a pet monkey or something. And then It sparks other people to be like, Hey, I want a pet monkey or a pet sloth or something. And then that can be really detrimental to that species.

[00:22:23] Colby Loucks: Absolutely. Good point. And we definitely try where we can to intercede where we can. Not always work, but ultimately at the end of the day, you know, if you see something, say something, right? And this website can help facilitate that. Definitely.

[00:22:38] Alex Re: And this will be my last question, but how can people support you?

[00:22:42] Colby Loucks: I think any time you can become more educated about any issue, and this issue would be conservation or wildlife conservation, you're going to be, uh, you're going to be smarter for it, and you're going to be able to identify and be creative for developing your own solutions or innovative solutions.

[00:22:58] Obviously, you could go to worldwildlife. org, how you can, we have tons of resources there to educate you, as well as resources for teachers such as yourself. It's called Wild Classroom. We know you have tough jobs. And you're working, you're working hard. And so it's like a full package of how you can teach a class on.

[00:23:18] How to reduce plastic pollution or how do you conserve elephants, et cetera, like that. So some of the ways that you can go about and support our work.

[00:23:25] Alex Re: That's awesome. I'm definitely going to have to take a look at that. It sounds really cool. Well, Colby, thank you so much for coming on again. I really appreciate it.

[00:23:33] I learned so much about all this cool technology. It kind of gets me really excited for what's to come with animal conservation.

[00:23:42] Colby Loucks: Well, it's been a joy on my end. I love talking about this and um, thank you for giving me the opportunity.

[00:23:50] Alex Re: Colby is such an awesome person who's really an innovator in the world of wildlife conservation.

[00:23:56] I think a lot of us view new technology as being harmful to the environment. And it definitely can be, but it's really cool to see technology being used to save our environment instead. I want to thank Colby again for being such an amazing guest, and you should all go check out WWF at worldwildlife. org to learn more about ways to help support and protect wildlife across the globe.

[00:24:21] And again, happy world wildlife day. Thank you so much for coming on this adventure with me. As we explore the world of technology in conservation, you can find the sources that we use for this podcast and links to organizations that we reference at on wildlife. org. You can also email us with any questions at onwildlife. podcast at gmail. com. And you can follow us on Instagram at on underscore wildlife or on TikTok at On Wildlife. And don't forget to tune in a few weeks from now for another awesome episode. And that's On Wildlife.

[00:25:03] Jess Avellino: You've been listening to on wildlife with Alex Re On Wildlife provides general educational information on various topics as a public service, which should not be construed as professional financial real estate tax or legal advice. These are our personal opinions only please refer to our. Full disclaimer policy on our website for full details.