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

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

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.

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.

Still, Liebenberg's motivations had as much to do with people as with animals. In preliminary tests in South Africa's Karoo National Park, trackers took to their new PalmPilots with ease--eager to transcend the boundaries of language and literacy and to have their new roles improve their status. Recording between 100 and 250 observations a day, they played a vital role in monitoring threats to the extremely rare black rhinos there. Their data showed how rhinos in the park changed their feeding habits as the seasons changed from wet to dry--information that could help park officials assist the rhinos in a severe drought.

Recently in the Karoo, five black rhinos that the trackers had been monitoring were moved from the region. "These original five rhinos were the desert subspecies of the black rhino. But then the powers that be decided to move these rhinos, and rhinos from East Africa that were in danger of being poached were moved in," says Liebenberg. "The scientists thought there would be no problem." But the trackers knew otherwise. The new rhinos, not adapted to the arid Karoo, weren't used to eating the same plants as their desert counterparts, and the transition wasn't as easy as expected.

Today Liebenberg runs tracker-training programs in eight South African parks, racing against time to locate the remaining highly skilled trackers from the San and other indigenous cultures and get them started training others. He foresees a network of tracker trainers spreading this almost lost knowledge as far as it can go. And indeed, that may be far--if the money holds out.

Two years ago, Liebenberg won a $50,000 Rolex Award for Enterprise for his innovation. He applied it all to enhancing the CyberTracker and getting new programs for it off the ground. But working in countries with scarce resources, he finds himself giving his product away. "We've sort of released the software, so people who can pay us pay, and people who don't have the money can use it anyway," says Liebenberg. "It's a struggle for me to survive financially."

His labor of both love and ingenuity might just turn things around. According to Howard Snell, a program leader at the Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands, scientists there are considering using CyberTrackers to quickly and inexpensively measure changes in the distribution, number, and status of marine iguanas, Galapagos tortoises, and other native wildlife. They would also want to map the progress and impacts of introduced animals such as feral goats, pigs, dogs, and cats. And they hope to document the effects of unsustainable human use. The CyberTracker technology is attractive because people already in the field--park wardens, tourist guides, and local inhabitants--can use it with a minimum of training.

But not all scientists are willing to employ such democratic data collection measures. Field science has traditionally been restricted to the academically trained, and some don't want to see this change. Park managers have been far more enthusiastic about nonscientists recording their daily finds, says Liebenberg. Most field scientists are able to be in their study areas for only short periods of time, yet armies of rangers and others patrol park lands every day.

To gain wider acceptance, Liebenberg may have to get more biologists to recognize tracking as a science. And that might happen as more projects, such as the one in the Odzala rainforest, achieve good results. "In the Congo," says Liebenberg, "they got 3,000 observations from four units in the first month alone."

That's the quantity of data needed when studying Eden. The vast rainforest clearings that startled biologists with their congregations of forest elephants, bongos, and other large, savanna-loving creatures turned out to be vast salines, or bais--mineral-rich geological features found nowhere else in central Africa. The forests around them supported the world's largest concentration of gorillas. And more surprises were to come. "Deep in the heart of the Congo Basin forest block," reports ECOFAC's Aveling, lives another anomaly: the last surviving forestdwelling lions.

Researchers have a chance to view a comer of paradise and save it even before it is in serious danger. "Poaching for elephants is an ever present threat," and an increasing one since the international body governing trade in endangered species allowed a one-time ivory sale, according to Aveling. "But otherwise the major part of the park is still relatively unaffected by human activities, as there are so few people living in the area. There is no commercial logging adjacent to the park, but this might change in the future, in which case pressures on the park are likely to change dramatically."

Liebenberg and ECOFAC team members are updating their PalmPilots with hundreds of icons that will depict the goings-on of more than 400 Congo-dwelling species. Over time, more will be added. More will be learned. And all of it will be mingled with data from other technologies to paint a picture of regional life never before possible. It's an endeavor whose rewards are great: the Congolese government recently decided to quadruple the park's boundaries-protecting 5,000 more square miles of this unique wilderness area.

Joni Praded is a contributing editor for Animals.