Wildlife trust uses IoT and 5G to protect African birds and big game

Satellite IoT firm Sateliot is offering free connectivity to Endangered Wildlife Trust and other NGOs to help tackle animal poaching in southern Africa.

The collaboration will see the deployment of Sateliot’s 5G IoT sensors on vultures across the continent, which, alongside other animals including lions, hyaenas, and leopards, are severely impacted by poisonings set up by poachers.

Currently, EWT is using the firm’s GPS-tracking technology to monitor the vultures’ behaviour and remotely detect the presence of poison sources and feeding events associated with potentially poison-laced carcasses.

The system, called ‘Eye in the Sky’ tracks over 380 vultures belonging to five different species. The GPS-equipped birds send alerts to various platforms, allowing rapid response teams to react to poisoning events.

In the past year, the system has successfully identified 15 poisoning events, allowing the teams to eliminate the poison sources and decontaminate the scenes, ultimately saving vultures’ lives in the area.

Now, with Sateliot’s 5G IoT satellites, the NGO will be able to extend coverage over more remote areas using standard terrestrial mobile connectivity without the  need for additional equipment.

This will extend its coverage over more remote areas that have limited connectivity, such as the large expanses of water and land where most of the Earth’s biodiversity is located – covering areas over 15 million square kilometres.

Sateliot is extending its free connectivity offer to other NGOs in the area to help monitor and save highly endangered species across the African landscape.

“By harnessing Sateliot’s advanced capacity allocation techniques, NGOs can tap into free satellite capacity during specific time slots and locations at no extra cost,” said CCO of Sateliot, Gianluca Redolfi.

Alison Janicke, EWT’s head of business development that the money it is saving on connectivity could now be reallocated and used on other  critical conservation work.

“Beyond the monetary savings, partnering with Sateliot will also spare us some time and effort spent on fundraising, allowing us to invest that time in on-the-ground conservation activities,” she added

Last year Sateliot revealed its efforts to help regulate the quality of drinking water in Africa, using IoT solutions from GoSpace Labs to connect to Sateliot’s 5G networks to alert of any contaminated water.

The Barcelona-based start up also has a 5G nanosatellite constellation aboard one of Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 series of rockets, aimed at providing cheaper connectivity for IoT devices.