SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - Conservationists at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park are turning to the public with a new way to help guide their efforts to safe threatened giraffe in Africa.
Ecologist David O'Connor recently returned from a trip to Kenya. He worked with a team to track giraffe by helicopter. They tranquilized 11 giraffe, then attached GPS trackers to their horns and released them. The whole process took no more than 20 minutes.
In addition, more than 100 cameras set up throughout Kenya are capturing images of wildlife. The conservationists hope to use crowdsourcing to to pour through the backlog of more than one million photographic images.
Through a website, wildwatchkenya.org, anyone can pull up the images and log information about the wildlife captured by the cameras.
O'Connor says that information is critical to understanding the movements of the giraffe. If the team on the ground in Kenya knows where the giraffe are and where they are likely to move to, they can send anti-poaching teams to protect the animals from the criminal poachers who have caused giraffe populations to decline precipitously in recent years.
Participation in the crowdsourcing effort is free, can be done in small increments of time as desired, and is available on both computers and mobile devices.
