VANCOUVER -- Forget Google Earth. Try Google Elephant.
Thanks in part to a tech-savvy student at the University of British Columbia, rangers in northern Kenya and South Africa are tapping into technology to combat poaching.
Jake Wall, a PhD student in UBC's geography department, works for the conservation group Save the Elephants, where he has helped outfit almost 100 of the mammals with GPS satellite-tracking collars.
"It gives us real insight into their day-to-day behaviour. At any given point they fire up Google Earth and check on the latest locations of the elephants and what they're doing," he said.
Researchers have used satellites to track the elephants' movements for decades but Wall then designed several software algorithms to crunch the live data and reveal patterns and, more importantly, any departure from patterns in their behaviour.
