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THE Cyber—Trackers - computerized recording of Bushmen's knowledge about animals helps protect African wildlife

Animals, Sept, 2000 by Joni Praded

Stone-age skills team with space-age technology to help conservationists learn more about--and protect--Africa's wild animals.

The first reports came in 1995. In the seemingly impenetrable rainforests tucked in the northeast corner of the Republic of the Congo, biologists began stumbling upon vast clearings swarming with elephants, chimpanzees, bongos, and lowland gorillas. They found giant forest hogs, buffaloes, sitatungas, and bushpigs--all roaming in this little-known West African outpost.

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The team reported their finds to their headquarters in Brazzaville. "Our initial reaction was to think that this was some kind of silly joke from a tired and overworked team in the field," recalls Conrad Aveling of ECOFAC, a European Union-funded forest conservation program in central Africa. "Everyone knows that large mammals are just not that abundant in the rainforest, and anyway, they are almost impossible to observe in dense forest."

Then the first photos arrived: about 80 elephants grazed in an expanse surrounded by rainforest; 12 lowland gorillas were visible in the background. Working in and around Odzala National Park, the ECOFAC team had uncovered a treasure trove of rare species. Says Aveling, the region "was turning out to be one of the last great wildlife discoveries of the millennium."

And so their work began. Five years later, ECOFAC and other organizations working in Odzala are employing satellite images, digital video images from aerial surveys, a global positioning system (GPS), and all manner of modern technology to unlock the mysteries of this Eden. Their goal is to conserve it, organize a guard force to protect it, and open it up to ecotourism in hopes of offsetting poaching, logging, and human encroachment--the dark clouds that swaddle this incredible silver-lining find. But one of the chief new tools in their arsenal is promisingly simple. The CyberTracker, a user interface for the PalmPilot, a small, handheld computer, has lofty wildlife conservation goals, the unique ability to combine state-of-the-art data collection with ancient tracking skills, and a growing reputation as one of the most innovative and democratic field-science tools of our time.

This new technology was born 2,000 miles away, in South Africa, around the same time that Odzala's bounty was shocking its investigators. There an iconoclast trained in mathematics and physics emerged from nearly two decades of following Bushmen as they tracked animals. To Louis Liebenberg, the San (as Bushmen are now commonly known) were a living database, one that contained far more information about their environment and the animals in it than modern science could ever divulge.

For hundreds of thousands of years, using information passed down by word of mouth, San hunters have tracked animals to support their subsistence lifestyle in the Kalahari Desert and beyond. A traditionally raised San hunter can walk through a barren landscape and, from scratches on the earth, decipher what animals were there before him, when they were there, what they ate, how they behaved, and where they were heading. Liebenberg, who immersed himself in this culture, wrote two books on tracking and committed himself to keeping the art alive.

But the Bushmen's language was complex, mixing clicks and other sounds with words that described nuances that even San-speaking trackers such as Liebenberg lacked the ability to comprehend completely. And there were other complications: the Bushman culture was dying out. "Of the few thousand Bushmen left in the Kalahari region, many have become outcasts who, despite their rich knowledge, have been exploited and are often given no credit for their skills," says Liebenberg. "Most have ended up in dead-end menial jobs." Liebenberg wanted to find a way to preserve their knowledge, pass it along to the scientific community, and in the process improve the lives of San who could not read or write but harbored volumes of knowledge.

So he searched for a technology that would record the San's observations. With the help of Edwin Blake, a computer science professor at the University of Cape Town, he decided to equip Bushmen with handheld computers linked to a satellite navigation GPS. The trackers would press screen after screen of computer icons to record the animals they sighted (in track or in the flesh), their behaviors, their food sources, and stores of other information. Their observations could be communicated in real time to scientists and park managers. The integrated GPS would automatically record the exact location of each find. And at the end of the day, the trackers could plug their PalmPilots into a personal computer at a field station and feed all their data into the larger, multifaceted databases that map the floral, faunal, geographic, and atmospheric makeup and movements of an ecosystem.

Together with postgraduate student Lindsay Steventon, Liebenberg programmed an interactive format that was user friendly and extremely flexible. The Cyber-Tracker was born, and its possibilities were many. Liebenberg imagined the units being used not just to report scientific data but also to report the presence and movements of poachers and to scout out animals for the ecotourism programs he hoped would help fund protection for wildlife-rich areas.

THE Cyber—Trackers - computerized recording of Bushmen's knowledge about animals helps protect African wildlife

Animals, Sept, 2000 by Joni Praded

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