Counting African elephants using satellites

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Satellite photos help elephant conservationists - 15th February 2021

Elephant conservation is joining the 21st century thanks to machine learning and observation satellites. At first, the satellite images appear to be of grey rocks in a sea of green, but scientists are using these images to count elephants. On closer inspection, these lumps are actually elephants wandering through the African forest.

The Earth observation satellite takes the photographs, orbiting at a distance of 600 kilometres from the surface. A computer algorithm which has been trained to identify any elephants then counts them. Without this technology, identifying the elephants would be almost impossible, owing to the quality of the photographs.

The satellite was initially trialled in South Africa’s Addo Elephant National Park, achieving great success. "It has a high density of elephants, and it has areas of thickets and open savannah, so it’s a great place to test our approach," University of Oxford conservation scientist Dr Isla Duporge said.

Conservationists working with elephants welcome the new technology and its potential, despite its expense. Monitoring wildlife in Africa is a huge challenge due to restrictions on permits for aircraft surveys.

Scientists see an additional benefit of the new technology: the pictures can also give information to help control the illegal hunting of elephants.

Dr Duporge commented, "In zoology, technology can move quite slowly, so being able to use the cutting-edge techniques for animal conservation is just really nice.”