Tag: AISRF

Frogs, poachers and a coral reef (Part 3 of 3)

The Purple Frog spends almost the whole year underground and surfaces for two weeks to mate, which makes sound the only way to study it. Where the wildlife work went next – acoustic sensing, poacher detection, a coral reef proposal that was not funded – and what the whole exercise taught me about asking the right question.

This is the last of three posts about the wildlife tracking work done at DA-IICT between 2006 and 2013, in collaboration with the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. The first part described how the work began; the second described the three systems we built – wildCENSE, a GPS collar whose data travels from animal to animal instead of by satellite; tigerCENSE, a camera trap rebuilt as a single wireless node with an infrared flash and no shutter sound; and turtleCENSE, which located an animal too small to carry a GPS receiver by measuring the signal strength of its beacon at a grid of fixed stations.

This part is about where those ideas went next, and what the whole exercise taught me.

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