Next month will make it four years that the Scar­let Ibis was of­fi­cial­ly de­clared an En­vi­ron­men­tal­ly Sen­si­tive Species (ESS) in T&T.

This des­ig­na­tion grant­ed the na­tion­al bird le­gal pro­tec­tion to en­sure its con­tin­ued sur­vival.

How­ev­er, de­spite the threat of hefty fines and im­pris­on­ment for killing the bird, as well as the pro­tec­tive le­gal sta­tus of its ma­jor breed­ing habi­tat, poach­ers have still been hunt­ing the Scar­let Ibis.

“We have very lit­tle pa­trolling in the swamp and we have a good law in place that gov­ern­ment feels that will take care of poach­ers. Yes, the fines went up to $100,000 and two years in jail but if they are not en­forc­ing the law and do­ing pa­trols day and night, peo­ple will still go and hunt the birds,” di­rec­tor Of Nanan’s Bird Sanc­tu­ary Tours Al­lis­ter Nanan told the Busi­ness Guardian.

Sec­tion 70 (2) of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Act, Chap­ter 35:05, “any per­son who know­ing­ly or reck­less­ly en­dan­gers or ad­verse­ly im­pacts the species will be li­able to a fine of $100,000.00 and im­pris­on­ment for two years.”

“Peo­ple ac­tu­al­ly know when the rangers are there or not and most of the times they are not there on week­ends and if there is a hol­i­day or long week­end peo­ple are go­ing and shoot­ing the birds and cook­ing and mak­ing their wild meat limes,” Nanan said.

Al­though 28 game war­dens were last year re­cruit­ed by the Forestry Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries (MALF) to help bol­ster its over­all staff com­pli­ment across its six con­ser­van­cies in Trinidad, no more than three war­dens are as­signed to the Ca­roni Swamp at any time.

“The Ca­roni Swamp is an es­tu­ar­ine sys­tem com­pris­ing 5,611 hectares of man­grove for­est and herba­ceous marsh, in­ter­rupt­ed by nu­mer­ous chan­nels, and brack­ish and saline la­goons, and with ex­ten­sive in­ter­tidal mud­flats on the sea­ward side,” ac­cord­ing to the Bird Sanc­tu­ary’s web­site.

But what if there was tech­nol­o­gy to help in this fight to save the Scar­let Ibis?

Well Huawei Tech­nolo­gies be­lieves there is.

En­ter Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion.

Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion builds and de­ploys scal­able, open acoustic mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems that it says can halt il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ty such as log­ging and poach­ing.

It can al­so help in bio­di­ver­si­ty mea­sure­ment and mon­i­tor­ing.

Huawei and Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion have part­nered to demon­strate how the dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy can be used to help con­serve na­ture glob­al­ly, in­clud­ing some projects in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.

In Cos­ta Ri­ca, a project was launched sev­er­al years ago to pro­tect the rain­for­est and the spi­der mon­keys.

In Chile, a sim­i­lar projects was launched last year to help pro­tect the rain­for­est and the en­dan­gered Dar­win’s fox..

And they are cur­rent­ly work­ing on a project in Yu­catan in south­ern Mex­i­co to help con­serve the bio­di­ver­si­ty of the wet­lands.

“Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion has now proud­ly part­nered with Huawei Tech4All to de­vel­op and use ad­vanced tech­nol­o­gy to mon­i­tor and pro­tect threat­ened re­gions span­ning ten coun­tries. By us­ing acoustic mon­i­tor­ing and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence, we are able to alert lo­cal peo­ple of when and where threats are oc­cur­ring and map out species pres­ence to in­form con­ser­va­tion ac­tion,” said Di­rec­tor of In­ter­na­tion­al Ex­pan­sion of Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion, Chris­sy Durkin.

The Guardian

Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion’s Guardian Plat­form up­loads au­dio record­ings to track both en­dem­ic species and alert au­thor­i­ties to il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ty in pro­tect­ed ar­eas.

The so­lar-pow­ered acoustic stream­ing de­vice is placed high in tree-top canopies.

The Guardian’s pri­ma­ry pur­pose is to con­stant­ly gath­er da­ta on the sur­round­ing en­vi­ron­ment for pro­cess­ing and stor­age.

It fea­tures a high­ly sen­si­tive ex­ter­nal mi­cro­phone that cap­tures all am­bi­ent sound with­in a ra­dius of 50 me­tres to 1,500 me­tres de­pend­ing on the source of the sound.

The Guardian al­so con­sists of a spe­cialised con­fig­u­ra­tion of so­lar pan­els which are de­signed to cap­i­talise on the thin and short-lived bands of sun­light that pen­e­trate tree canopies.

It al­so has an on-board pow­er man­age­ment and lithi­um iron phos­phate (LFP) bat­tery packs.

The Guardian up­loads a con­tin­u­ous record­ing of the sur­round­ing en­vi­ron­ment’s sound­scape, trans­mit­ting the au­dio in re­al-time to the cloud for in­stant analy­sis.

When the Guardian is con­nect­ed via Satel­lite, on-board analy­sis of au­dio is per­formed and alerts are trans­mit­ted in re­al-time.

“The da­ta-pow­ered Guardian Plat­form us­es ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) and ma­chine learn­ing to de­liv­er rapid in­sight in­to what’s hap­pen­ing in vast for­est ecosys­tems, iden­ti­fy po­ten­tial­ly harm­ful be­hav­iour, and help on-the-ground rangers pin­point and stop dam­ag­ing ac­tiv­i­ties as they oc­cur,” Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion stat­ed.

“Es­sen­tial­ly if there is any dis­tinct sound that you can hear and you would say we need to make an alert for that boat mo­tors, peo­ple talk­ing at that time, gun­shots, as long as there is a dis­tinct sound we can cre­ate an AI mod­el for it so we may need to cre­ate a new AI mod­el or re­train one of the ones we have but we should be able to do that and then place re­al time de­vices there,” Durkin told the Busi­ness Guardian.

Durkin was part of the Huawei Latam ICT Con­gress 2022 held at the JW Mar­riott Can­cun, Mex­i­co.

“We in­stall de­vices in the tree canopy and as long as we de­vel­op the AI mod­el for the sounds that we are look­ing for we would be able to put a project there,” Durkin said.

Durkin said Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion is cur­rent­ly in­volved in a project with the Unit­ed States Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice in Puer­to Ri­co.

“We are ac­tu­al­ly mon­i­tor­ing the en­tire is­land so we mon­i­tor over 900 sites across the is­land and are de­tect­ing over 100 species to map out over a long time pe­ri­od what is hap­pen­ing across the is­land,” Durkin said.

“We ac­tu­al­ly dis­cov­ered that the biggest fac­tor that is chang­ing species dis­tri­b­u­tion in that is­land con­text is pre­cip­i­ta­tion so they are mov­ing to high­er el­e­va­tion so es­sen­tial­ly you can think about if ar­eas that we used to pro­tect in­di­vid­ual species that are no longer suit­able habi­tats as the cli­mate changes,” she said.

“So you have to cre­ate strate­gies around how can you cre­ate cor­ri­dors how can you pro­tect new ar­eas so as the cli­mate changes the species will still have suit­able habi­tats and that is par­tic­u­lar­ly im­por­tant in the is­land con­text be­cause there is such a lim­it­ed amount of land and lim­it­ed num­ber of habi­tats they can live in,” Durkin said.

Durkin told BG the project is be­ing fund­ed by a grant for the US gov­ern­ment.

“In these cor­po­rate so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty projects, we take an ap­proach of us­ing our tech­nolo­gies and ap­ply­ing them to re­al prob­lems and chal­lenges so that we can even­tu­al­ly pro­duce in­no­v­a­tive so­lu­tions suit­able for the lo­cal con­text,” said Marce­lo Pino, Vice Pres­i­dent of Pub­lic Af­fairs at Huawei Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.

The world’s grow­ing pop­u­la­tion re­quires more pow­er than ever be­fore, with av­er­age en­er­gy con­sump­tion jump­ing by one per cent to two per cent every year.

It is es­ti­mat­ed that three-quar­ters of the land-based en­vi­ron­ment and two-thirds of the ma­rine en­vi­ron­ment have been sig­nif­i­cant­ly al­tered by hu­man ac­tions.

About one mil­lion an­i­mal and plant species are threat­ened with ex­tinc­tion.

Huawei has launched Tech4All, its flag­ship cor­po­rate so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty project in re­cent years, of­ten in col­lab­o­ra­tion with in­ter­na­tion­al or­ga­ni­za­tions such as Rain­for­est Con­nec­tion.

Tourist at­trac­tion

“The Ca­roni Swamp and the in­hab­it­ing Scar­let Ibis are a pop­u­lar tourist at­trac­tion, and are in­ter­na­tion­al­ly renowned as “must-see” nat­ur­al trea­sures. Liveli­hood op­por­tu­ni­ties are pro­vid­ed via eco-tours and bird watch­ing tours in the Ca­roni Swamp,” ac­cord­ing to the ESS (Scar­let Ibis) No­tice 2018.

“Tourist vis­its have gen­er­at­ed over $1 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly, since the 1970s which con­tributes to the coun­try’s eco-tourism in­dus­try and sup­ports many liveli­hoods,” it stat­ed.

This coun­try’s Head of State Pres­i­dent Paula-Mae Weekes was one of the vis­i­tors this week­end, Nanan said.

“Just imag­ine we had the pres­i­dent on tour on Sat­ur­day and the feed­back we got was there hard­ly had birds, there hard­ly had scar­let ibis. I felt kind of dis­ap­point­ed,” Nanan said.

“But the thing is it is not us. The gov­ern­ment needs to do more. Don’t wait for the last bird to die then to jump in and do some­thing. Let us come to­geth­er and save the wet­lands,” Nanan said.

Nanan de­scribed the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion as “dev­as­tat­ing.”

“If you don’t want to put coast guard or war­dens day and night use some tech­nol­o­gy and let’s see what we could do,” Nanan said.

“ Once the news starts to trav­el peo­ple will stop go­ing in there. That is what they need to do be­cause when peo­ple know there is no pa­trol they are tak­ing a chance,” Nanan said.

In 2018 the pop­u­la­tion size of the scar­let ibis was es­ti­mat­ed to range be­tween 8,000—30,000 birds.