Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It can be categorised into three sections.
Currently, there is an international ban on ivory trade, however poaching still occurs. The poaching of elephants is for their ivory tusks which are used for ornaments, piano keys and other items used by humans. The poachers are not usually the ones who keep the ivory, they sell them and it is part of their day to day income.
Although it is part of their income and to support their day to day life, the ivory trade is still illegal, and elephant poaching as a whole is illegal in national parks (some people poach elephants for their skin and meat).
The Nouabale-Ndoki national park is where our client is currently based, and trying to prevent poaching. This national park has the following goals:
Strengthening protected area management capacity
Protecting the park and its wildlife through the implementation of a full-chain, hunter to consumer, wildlife law enforcement program
Working with remote, local communities to improve their livelihoods, promote sustainable natural resource use in the park periphery, and work towards a situation where people feel that they benefit from the park
Using science to drive informed conservation decisions for the long-term protection of the Ndoki landscape and its wildlife.
Our gunshot detection system can help to achieve these sustainability goals.
Forest elephants are known as the architects of the rainforest, they have a unique lifestyle and is adapted to living in dense vegetation such as the forest. They depend on fruits found in the forest and they disperse seeds all around the forest.
The poaching of these forest elephants directly impact on the rainforest. Poaching these elephants means that there is a reduce in the amount of seed dispersion, essentially preventing the diverse nature of rainforests and the spread of fruits and plants across the forest in which many animals depend on.
They play an important role in balancing natural ecosystems. They trample forests and dense grasslands, making room for smaller species to co-exist. Elephants also create water holes used by other wildlife as they dig dry riverbeds when rainfall is low. Read more here.
“Without intervention to stop poaching, as much as 96 percent of Central Africa’s forests will undergo major changes in tree-species composition and structure as local populations of elephants are extirpated, and surviving populations are crowded into ever-smaller forest remnants,” explained John Poulson from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, the lead author of the study.
Using our system helping to find these poachers and stop them will have a significant impact on the environment to help protect the rainforest ecosystem. In order to keep the rainforest diverse, poaching of elephants must slow down, and eventually stop.
Once our client deploys our system on devices of their choice, the build of these devices should be environmentally/contextually friendly. The reason for this being that the device should fit in with the environment and ecosystem, not disrupt. Disruption could be things such as being in the way of animals or birds, causing harm to animals or birds or the environment such as trees and plants.
They should also last a long time and/or be reusable in order to reduce wastage. Rechargable batteries can be used in deployment which will significantly reduce wastage and slows down the use of the Earth’s metals and minerals.
From an economic sustainability point of view, the cost of running our system, whether it be at the lab or on the field must be viable.
Our system can be run on any device with a GPU, and if running shorter clips it can be run on a CPU. The electricity costs for this is the main economic factor for running our system as well as the purchasing of stronger hardware if need be, which is high initial fees. This would be economically stable if you are running the system a lot for data collection.
Running our system on the cloud would mean that the intial fees and electricity costs are not a factor, but only the pay as you go cost of running the model. This is an economically sustainable method since oyu only pay for what you use.
Deploying our system on devices in the field would have high initial costs. Since our system can be used from the go, it does not have any software upkeep costs and therefore all the costs would be the actual deployed devices. It would be economically viable if the amount of maintenance isn’t too costly, for example battery changes of the devices.