Anti-poaching

Protected areas are big, often thousands of square kilometres, and the teams guarding them are small. A patrol covers a fraction of that in a night, on foot or along the handful of routes a vehicle can take. In many parks only a small share of the area is actively patrolled, and anyone who knows where the patrols go also knows where they don't.

Poaching there is not an incident but an industry. The global trade in ivory, horn and bone runs into tens of billions of dollars a year, and the people who walk into the bush are the bottom link of a chain that reaches far beyond the park. They move through the area for days at a time, kill several animals and pass the location to accomplices who collect. Arrested poachers are often back out within weeks.

Rangers are rarely short of things happening. What they are short of is hearing about them in time. Tracks turn up the next morning, a gunshot is only heard if someone happens to be nearby, and a carcass mostly tells you what already went wrong. Camera traps and sensors do help here, but they watch a single point: you have to know in advance where someone will pass. Across thousands of square kilometres, that is the one thing nobody can tell you.

ScannerEdge listens passively for the radio signals that phones, satellite phones and two-way radios inevitably emit, even when nobody is using them. It detects human presence up to roughly a kilometre away and warns rangers hours before tracks or gunshots would.

Signals are never decoded and no personal data is recorded. The sensor establishes that a device is present, nothing more. Because it transmits nothing itself it cannot be detected or jammed, and it runs for months on solar power in a tree.

In most of the parks where we work there is no network to carry an alert. So we lay that down too: a LoRaWAN backbone with gateways on radio masts, or satellite where that is not an option, so a detection reaches the ranger post within seconds.

Alongside it we deploy Instant Detect at the places where you know someone has to pass: a river crossing, a gate, a path through the fence line. Those cameras recognise people with AI on the device itself and forward only that one image. So ScannerEdge gives the early signal that someone is there, and the camera shows who or what. Between them, a team has enough to send out a patrol on.