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The Big Picture, In Stunning Detail: How new imaging technology aids wildlife conservation

There’s a brave new world of image-capturing technologies out there, and conservationists like Defenders’ Senior Southwest Representative Craig Miller are using them to enhance the efficacy of field work, and to share it with the world.

Originally used on the Mars exploration, GigaPan is a new camera-based technology that employs a robot mounted on a tripod. The robot precisely moves a camera vertically and horizontally to take sequential photos, and then stitches them together to produce billion-pixel resolution images. These images can then be “explored” remotely from any computer.

GigaPan, the brainchild of a partnership between Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Lab, Google Earth, NASA and the FINE Foundation, has produced what science writer Karen A. Frenkel calls “an immersive, interactive experience that can reveal surprising details – an ant on a leaf in a forest, or a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower in a backyard.”

Armed with the new ability to, as Frenkel says, “[view] nature through a huge magnifying glass,” the organizations next gathered scientists from around the world to test GigaPan’s true colors by exploring field applications of the technology. Miller, one of the FINE fellows, has set up experimental photo-monitoring sites associated with Defenders’ jaguar, wolf and border conservation programs. At the sites, he uses GigaPan to document impediments to wildlife movement and measure ecological changes in response to various landscape treatments, such as livestock removal, erosion control and the eradication of invasive plants…

(read more: Defenders of Wildlife)