Snow Leopard Conservancy teams with CyberTracker

Snow Leopard Conservancy - Conservation Program

Putting Powerful Wildlife Tracking Technology in the Hands of Local Communities

The Snow Leopard Conservancy has joined forces with CyberTracker to develop a simple system using a hand-held computer with a GPS to enable local people to monitor and record information on snow leopards, their prey and habitat.

The Snow Leopard Conservancy – India is training village-based nature guides to gather standardized, geographically precise observations of local wildlife, and also to document livestock depredation events. Each guide periodically delivers the hand-held computer to a “mother computer,” where the information is transferred directly into a Geographic Information System (GIS) to be analyzed or used in map preparation. Thus communities are engaged and empowered to monitor “their” wildlife, and contribute directly and meaningfully to the big-picture conservation efforts that SLC is promoting throughout the Himalaya and elsewhere, yielding important benefits for conservation, anti-poaching and, baseline monitoring of rare species.

Both Rodney Jackson, founder-director of the Snow Leopard Conservancy, and Louis Liebenberg, the originator of the innovative CyberTracker tracking system, won Rolex Awards for Enterprise—Jackson in 1981 and Liebenberg in 1998. Coincidentally, besides their common interest in tracking animals and the sign they leave in the environment, both men were born in South Africa.

Over the past five years, Louis’s innovative software has begun to revolutionize conservation and wildlife management. His device is enabling Africa’s Bushmen to preserve their legendary yet vanishing tracking skills and turn their unrivalled traditional knowledge of the Kalahari Desert to helping protect the region’s unique biodiversity. CyberTracker.

The Snow Leopard Conservancy’s application of the CyberTracker system also integrates traditional knowledge with state of the art technology, but in terrain as high, cold and rugged as the Kalahari is [hot, sandy and flat]. Test communities in Ladakh are using CyberTracker to record sightings of animals and their sign, document the location of depredation incidents and the predator responsible, and gather data along sign transects employing the SLIMS methodology developed by Jackson and his associates. At the same time, young men and women who prefer not to migrate to distant cities for jobs are able to integrate wildlife monitoring with their other community-based ecotourism livelihoods. Units will also be deployed in China and Tajikistan in the summer of 2006.

We believe CyberTracker will be equally valuable to trained scientists, replacing pen and paper and mitigating the challenge of taking notes on windy ridges or in subzero temperatures.

Don’t throw it Away!! We are looking for donations of the Handspring Visor Platinum PDA (Palm OS version 3.5.2) with the Magellan Companion GPS module for use by local nature guides linked with the Himalayan Homestays program (www.Himalayan-Homestays.com). As they become available, units will be deployed on the Tibetan Plateau in China, in Northern Pakistan and in Tajikistan for wildlife monitoring.

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