World Nature Conservation Day - Act now to save tomorrow!

The numbers are astounding and unsettling. The international Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) red List of Threatened Species(2024-1), the most comprehensive source of information on the global conservation status of animal, fungal, and plant species, indicates that over 45,000 species are threatened with extinction worldwide. These species include 26% mammals, 41% amphibians, 12% birds, 37% sharks and rays, 21% reptiles, 34% conifers, 28% selected crustaceans, and 71% cycads. For that reason, there is a lot of talk about wildlife conservation, which tries to save plant and animal species from extinction due to population growth.

Globally, cutting-edge technology is currently being utilized for animal conservation, including drones, camera traps, satellites, acoustic monitoring, and remote sensing techniques that employ lasers to estimate the 3D structure of the target region, such as a cliff face or forest canopy. The fields of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have the power to completely transform the conservation of animals. The fact that the market for environmental, conservation, and wildlife organizations has risen significantly in recent years—it is expected to grow from $26.22 billion in 2023 to $36.65 billion in 2028—serves as a good indicator of the importance of technology.

The use of technology to save wildlife is becoming more popular in India. The engineering firm E-Gravity introduced a GPS-based radio collar for tracking wild elephants in september 2022. The Habitats Trust is utilizing machine intelligence (ML, AI, DL) to maximize conservation efforts, subsea robotics to improve and speed up coral reef monitoring efforts, and geographic data to comprehend India's grassland coverage. The indian Institute of Science has been working on improving technology that aids wildlife researchers and forest departments; the Wildlife Tech Incubator seeks to promote innovations unique to india in the field of wildlife conservation; and the Tree Foundation has employed satellite tags to monitor turtles, providing commercial fishermen with information about the turtles' feeding grounds and congregation paths, thereby preventing their entrapment and death.