hi everyone thanks so much for joining us this is conservation in the classroom where you get the chance to interact with one of wwf's very own experts my name is kate i will be your host today and before we get started i just want to take a few minutes to welcome all of our students teachers and parents that are joining us off camera today if you guys can please use that chat box that you see on your screen to introduce yourselves you can tell us what town you're from or what school you're from that chat area is also going to be where you place any questions that you have for our expert throughout the presentation and just a reminder you do not have to wait till he is finished giving his presentation you can place your questions in that chat at any time and we will try to get to as many as we can at the end here we are really excited to have a few groups joining us on camera today so before i introduce our presenter i want to introduce those groups to you so let's start with penelope and oakley that we have joining us from indianapolis indiana if you guys can hear me why don't you go ahead and say hi great next up we have robinson's heroes joining us from independence missouri i'm trying to unmute you guys here give us a big wave robinson's heroes there you guys are now we can hear you awesome okay and last but not least we have miss kudrick's class from matamoros pennsylvania how are you guys doing there they are okay um so now i am really excited to introduce our featured presenter his name is eric becker he is a conservation engineer with wwf us and today eric's going to talk to us a bit about how he was able to turn his love for animals and gadgets as a kid into a really really cool career so he's going to talk to us about some of the projects he's been working on using technology to help protect some of the world's most important species so eric before you share your screen if you want to just take a minute to say hi and then take it away the floor is all yours oh you're on mute sorry i was muted in two places um you'd figure i'd be useless now with everybody on zoom but thanks for taking the time to listen to a little bit about my work uh and what it's like to be an engineer working in conservation trying to protect wildlife um so yeah i'm excited to talk a little bit about my work and hear what you guys have to say your questions and yeah thank you okay yeah you're all set um if you want to go ahead and share your screen so we can see your presentation and you're ready to go all right so again my name is eric becker um i work in the wwf us office um wws is an organization that has offices all over the world and they work on every conservation related issue that you can imagine um at wwf uh i'm what they call a conservation engineer and i was actually the the first engineer that the wwf us office hired so they kind of created this this title for me so kind of this all-encompassing engineer for conservation um before getting into like some of the technical things or talking about my work just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself um i live in the pensacola florida area which is northwest florida close to alabama i love surfing i love the app being outdoors i love skateboarding i love being with my family and spending time with them but i also love engineering which is my job but also my passion and hobby so it's really great i have to be one of the luckiest engineers that actually gets the i mean play all day as as work so before joining wwf um i went to school for electrical and computer engineering i did a lot of work with um our research and development on on big drones and small drones specifically for the military and then i started working with special forces where i would drive unmanned or remote cars and they could practice doing things or making communications or tracking devices for them or again figuring out how they what technology they could use to help make their job a little bit easier i joined wwf in the beginning of 2015 and it really started off when i went to a meeting with my former or a gentleman i used to do research and development on drones with and met with wwf listened to their issues understood a little bit more about conservation because again my engineering background i just had really no clue other than what i've heard or read on the internet but just came away inspired and really saw how i could use my skill set to try and help with tackling some of these conservation issues so now as wwf conservation engineer i get to spend a lot of time in the field where i travel to these sites protected areas whether it's in africa asia in north america wherever it might be and go on the ground and see firsthand like what is happening in the field work with rangers who are trying to protect wildlife work with researchers who trying to understand wildlife and then with park management who try and manage these populations and just try and see what technology will actually work in the field here in the u.s and of a lot of i guess western nations the the technology is ubiquitous so everybody has cell phones a lot of people have smart homes um you just see technology around you um all the time and you i mean basically grow have grown up with it nowadays in africa and asia and these protected areas they're still very remote so the world's not as wired as you would think it would be where you would imagine all this same type of technology being used in the field but it's really not these places are still truly wild so we again want to just identify what will actually work and help these rangers help the researchers help the managers and before i get into the specific projects and the tech that we use i just wanted to ask a couple questions and specifically what is i mean conservation and so conservation the earth's natural resources sources include air minerals plants soil water and wildlife and conservation is the care and protection of these resources so that them so that they can persist for future generations so basically that these things stay around and they just don't disappear which in the news you hear a lot of lately um and what is engineering yeah there we go uh engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems engineers trying to figure out how things work and find practical uses for either scientific discovery making people's lives easier uh just trying to again come up with a unique or innovative solution for a specific problem um so as an engineer i get to apply uh all of the engineering principles to try and tackle any of the conservation challenges so it could be working trying to figure out how to protect forests how to monitor the climate or track wildlife or sense things in the water whatever it might be it's across the board which is really interesting some of the specific challenges that i focus on again wwf works across the board on every conservation issue um but i being on at wwf i'm also on what they call the wildlife team and we have different programmatic teams that focus on different issues so i specifically work on wildlife related issues but i still work with colleagues again across the board because wildlife also have to do with forests and ecosystems and climate and all these other things they're interconnected but i focus on anti-poaching which is basically trying to stop people from hurting or harming wildlife for their parts or for track trafficking actual live birds for pets or whatever it might be um but just just really trying to stop the killing and the capture of wildlife in these protected areas or national parks i also work on mitigating or trying to stop human wildlife conflict and human wildlife conflict is basically the wildlife and humans are competing for the same resources whether that's the habitat or landscape or food so a good example is maybe lions leaving a park to go eat cattle and a nearby cattle ranch or elephants going and raiding a crop full of watermelon which they which is like the candy store for elephants and it's it's interesting elephants are really smart they know exactly when the watermelon is going to be the ripest and the sweetest and that's when they go and raid so we try and come up with these tools or technologies that can uh to help mitigate those issues and again i also work with wildlife researchers and management to try and utilize some of the same or use the same technology to maybe track animals or listen to them like they're bird vocal talking or elephants communicating whatever it might be to try and again better inform these these researchers who are trying to understand the behavior or maybe they're trying to see the what is the range or how far did these animals actually travel for i mean and how much area do we need to protect basically to keep them safe but also provide the habitat that they require so as a conservation engineer again working in the fields um when i go into these places i ask myself uh a lot of questions i mean i basically go into the park and if you could imagine just sitting there in in the quiet in the forest what i mean what kind of things can you sense or how do you censor see hear the world feel it um and these are the types of things that we can use whether it's like again listening for bird calls or seeing animals walk by um whatever it might be these are the same types of senses or what we call sensors and that we can use to again put something in these protected areas so we can monitor what's actually happening happening so again i mean just go into these force or whenever you're in nature you can sit and just listen and look around and i mean smell and when you touch the ground you feel things shaking or whatever it might be um these are the types of things that we uh try and leverage uh to detect wildlife um and again it's very difficult and you'll also understand when you're in the middle of these national park these places are huge so you're trying to find basically a needle and a haystack when you're trying to find a tiger which is very elusive or an elephant whatever species that might be so i wanted to play this video i took this video and i was on a patrol with rangers in kenya and this is after what they call an ambush and basically anti-poaching rangers will sit or before uh technology they would sit wait and listen um and basically try and hear or see poachers in the dead of night i mean pitch black you can barely see your your nose i mean in front of your eyes um so it was really difficult they would sit wait and listen and just by chance maybe a poacher would come and walk by them and they'd hear them and then spring this ambush and their high tech method before we started using uh this technology that i'm about to talk about was a flashlight or headlights and a radio um which you can imagine again in a park maybe the size of a state um trying to find that needle in the haystack or the poacher with a flashlight let alone the fact that that same person that you would be trying to find if you did have your light on they'd be able to see you and run away so we just try and use technology and the other thing too is and actually on when i was filming this there were hyenas kind of surrounding us as we were out on this patrol so there's hyenas elephants lions buffalo a lot of uh dangerous wildlife that we're trying to protect but there still could hurt rangers pretty seriously so we want to use technology or identify technology that can again keep these rangers safe and give make them a little more effective when they're out on these patrols they can now cover a vast area or a large area using technology so when i joined wwf um wwf had gotten or had received a google global impact award from google.org and the goal of that grant that we received from google was to stop poaching using drones so it was basically here's a bunch of money go find drones deploy them in the field and we're going to stop coaching and when when i joined wwf working with my colleagues and visiting these sites on the ground and with my again i was hired because of my drone experience when i was working with the military um would quickly realize that with the drones that these rangers could afford or use they weren't necessarily the silver bullet or the only answer they might be part of the answer to try and protect these animals but they weren't the silver bullets so we started looking at what other types of technology beyond drones and including drones can we use um to again keep these rangers safe protect the communities make park management's lives easier and then again help under push the the knowledge for science and the researchers that are trying to understand these wildlife and let me stop sharing my screen for a moment pull up my video um i don't know if you guys can see my camera it might be really small on your screen but this is an example of and i have a few different examples that i'd like to show you but this is a handheld thermal camera or what they call a thermal camera this is what they can use to pick up heat and i'll talk a little bit more about this technology in a second we also deploy different kind of tracking devices and you can see this is kind of large and clunky the same thing goes with with this is with a collar a wildlife collar this is something that we would use on maybe a lion tiger jaguar or a big cat you can just see that this is very large and you imagine this is kind of heavy and nobody really wants to walk around for maybe two years with this attached to their head so part of my job again is to try and identify what technologies we can use to maybe make it a little bit easier on the animals whether it's even just putting sensors and not having to put tags on animals or actually coming up with something maybe a little bit smaller and this is something that's very lightweight but we would typically use on like large birds or um small mammals but the technology that's inside here can also be used for maybe tracking an elephant uh or a rhino and again just use solar power so we don't need such a big battery and we can make this thing smaller and lighter just to make it easier for the the animal to wear this tracking device and we also put out what they call camera traps so this is a small wireless camera that takes pictures when things walk by it so with this type of camera if you imagine you could put these things throughout the park or maybe in what they call hot spots or maybe around a watering hole and you can get pictures as the animals walk by we could also use some of the software that's being um i guess pioneered by mobile devices or cell phones where we can use um artificial intelligence to tell us what's inside or what's what passed in front of the camera because this same type of camera may take a thousand pictures because maybe leaves moved or the sun was setting or a car drove by um and we're really trying to maybe find that one out that one picture of say a snow leopard out of the thousands of pictures with sun or moving grass or whatever it might be so we try and use artificial intelligence to look for the things that that are in the pictures that same type of artificial intelligence which is software and software is just a a word that's used to describe a program or a set of rules that runs inside a computer we can use that same software the ai algorithms on say a microphone to listen with audio or and i'll start sharing my screen again um or use different types any kind of sensor and apply this what they call machine learning or ai to have this thing tell us what's happening in front of it a good another good example and actually where a lot of the technologies come from is like amazon alexa or the the google assistant or siri but basically this program that you can talk to your phone and it understands what you're saying and then it'll go and find an answer or whatever you asked it to do or it'll control your your air conditioning or open a door or whatever it might be the smart home or what they call internet of things um basically where things around you are now connected to the internet and they can all talk to each other that same technology is enabling us to start putting these same types of microphones cameras um or whatever it might be in the field so that the sensors or the actual device or technology can tell us what's happening so if an elephant calls or there's a gunshot the same software that's in your google assistant will say i mean we'll listen for the gunshot and let's send you an alert that they heard something in the forest that you care about so again wwf with this we look at creating this kind of toolbox or these different technologies that will tell us different things but when they all come together they can create this one common picture one of the main technologies that we've really been focusing on is thermal cameras um let's see thermal cameras to again protect wildlife in communities and rangers and compared to other sensors we wanted to try and um see what could work quickly like what can we deploy in the field now while we go back and are developing these really cool gadgets that can solve these problems maybe in a different way but what can we install quickly that will have an impact that will stop the poaching um and one of the technologies identified was this thermal camera so with these thermal cameras the rangers can see at night we can protect park boundaries and i'll get into a little bit of this in a second but i mean with thermal cameras um we utilize what's where they utilize what's called the electromagnetic spectrum you guys are probably if you haven't learned about this yet you'll probably learn about it soon but basically light what you see is light or basically what your eyeball see is just a very very small sliver or very small amount of the actual light that's around you in the world one like your wi-fi or the cell phone towers they're light you just can't think about or you just don't see it because their light bulb or the antennas are flashing this this this on and off light so you can communicate to each other but humans can't see it because it's not in this small visible light uh the sliver of what humans can see the thermal cameras also use part of this electromagnetic spectrum or light that's what's in part of the spectrum called the infrared and what the infrared is and what basically it picks up on is the glow of warm objects or the things around you what people don't realize is everything around you that you look around and see everything is glowing or emitting light with the humans we just can't see it but say when you're looking at a campfire or any kind of fire and you see the coals or the embers glowing red or orange basically what that is is that glow or what they call the spectrum of emission is just getting hot enough to where it's in that small sliver of what humans can see and that glow is the heat that's radiated but when it's cooler when it's not glowing red hot it still glows but it's in this infrared spectrum or this this part of the light humans can't see but the thermal cameras are designed to specifically see that that heat and again that's that's beneficial because then you can start providing rangers with the night vision capabilities so when they're on foot they can scan an area again with this with handheld thermal camera and look for living objects because living or what we say like warm-blooded things uh radiate more heat than say vegetation or plants or trees they all glow but um the humans or the animals are just slightly warmer in the background and that that heat difference uh when the thermal camera sees it it creates this video or this picture where you can see the hotter object glowing brighter than the background vegetation and you can kind of see how we can use these to create a digital trip line say there's a park or a national park a protected area and then there's a community or a city or village on the outside of the park we can create this digital trip line to say protect the rhinos or whatever it might be inside the national park or again protect the communities that live outside or right up against the national park or protected area we can also put the thermal cameras on drones so you can fly around and the rangers can use it to see what's happening in front of them again to see poachers or wildlife elephants whatever it might be researchers use them so they can fly these things high up in the air and go and take a bunch of pictures and then come back and count the elephants or whatever wildlife or whatever they're trying to see fires is a good example too we also use it for human wildlife conflict and i'll show you a video in a minute but we can the elephants and other wildlife really hate the smell the smell the sound of drones and the look of them because it's this weird um foreign object that's flying overhead so it's a really good tool for rangers to go and fly and push or shoo the the elephants back into the national park or protected area with this covet or coronavirus stuff i don't know if you guys have seen how they're using these thermal cameras now to measure body temperature that's what they call radiometric thermal or basically at a distance they can measure the temperature of what's in the the thermal cameras uh video in this bottom left picture with the green was when i was trying to see if you could detect uh sea turtle eggs under the sand which you could see a little bit but the the sand was a little bit warmer uh when we were scanning these and during the nesting season to where it would wash out that the same would be warmer than the eggs so that didn't necessarily work but that same type of technology can be used to say take the measurement of whatever wildlife remotely or detect fires we also put them on the thermal cameras big longer range thermal cameras on the ranger vehicles almost like a jeep and they can use that to scan around a large area up to two miles away when they're out in the field to look for poachers or look for wildlife and then radio with a small handheld radio or cell phone communicate to the other rangers that are on foot to tell them where the poachers might be or where the the dangerous wildlife might be so they can avoid them so like i had mentioned before um the glowing the the warm-blooded object versus the background vegetation that same glow in the video we can use to create software algorithms or artificial intelligence algorithms that look for these things in the video so here's an example of the thermal camera running the algorithm looking for humans and whenever it sees a human it draws a red bounding box or what we call bounding box around the thing in the video and you can imagine that down the center of this this picture we would draw a line in our software so anything say the left side of this picture would be the community land or the city and the right side would be the national park so the software looks for things coming from the left side or the community land and coming into the protected area so as soon as these people would walk across this line that we draw in the video the software starts alerting it draws the red box and it starts alerting rangers that somebody's entering the park um so they can go and and try and see and find out what that person is doing and arrest them if they're there to do bad things um the same goes the same software we use for human wildlife conflict for that same line when something comes from the park and goes into the community land we would send an alert to the rangers you don't have to watch the video all the time like you imagine a security like video security system there's always pictures of somebody watching the the video 24 7 looking for things we use computers and software to look for the things we care about so the rangers don't have to constantly 24 7 be watching the video and the software will just alert they'll actually listen or they'll hear like an alarm beep when something happens of interest and the computer will pull up what that alarm was caused by so they can again respond um and that that's also important to have the computers watch the video you should just because you can imagine trying to protect something the size of a state how many i mean you would need hundreds or thousands of cameras um to have 24 7 i guess eyes on the forest and there's no way for the human or you would have to have teams and teams of rangers to just watch every single camera looking for something of interest that happens and with this using the computer and the ai that's watching for these same i guess threats or alerts it just makes it easy because as the we put more and more cameras that you can still only have the one or two rangers that are listening for these alerts because they don't have to watch every single one they only have to watch the one that's saying something bad happened or something of interest so back whenever i my previous comment about the world not being as wired um as it is or there's not as much technology in the field which we don't want we don't want to go into these protected areas and see cell phone powers everywhere so we want to make sure that we put them in really strategic places and give us the maximum coverage with the least amount of towers but when you go into these parks there's no internet there's no cell phone signal no wi-fi there's no power there's no the electrical grid there you can't plug into a wall outlet in the national park there's again no cell phone tower so we have to bring everything uh into the protected area when we want to put up any kind of technology so this is one of the towers that we put up in zambia and it's actually on this lake called the lake of tejadeji on an island in the middle of the lake in the middle of nowhere so everything you see on the in this picture we physically had to carry on a boat i think it took us nine trips back and forth to bring all the cement the sand the rocks the solar panels batteries everything we needed to build this mast in the middle of nowhere and that goes i mean for every single project that we've deployed we always have to build up this infrastructure or put up the connectivity or wi-fi before we can start putting out these cool sensors to start understanding what's happening we also have to install control rooms where we have all of this data from our all the the alerts from and pictures and things coming from all the sensors come into one what we call a control room and this is where the rangers would sit and watch and listen for these alerts they could see where all their rangers are walking around they can see where any animals that have tracking devices are and just get one big picture of what's happening and the goal of this type of project or these types of technology projects is to give them kind of almost like a jurassic park image where you have this thing on the screen that tells you everything that's happening where your staff are where the rangers are where the wildlife are where the threats are just so they can effectively manage these areas because a lot of these national parks do not have enough rangers um to protect this the the entire national park effectively um so a lot of times they're understaffed under man where one ranger may have to watch an area the size of a county in the u.s so we try and utilize this technology to be like to enhance their abilities and basically turn one ranger into somebody with technology that can cover that entire county without having to again bring in more and more rangers and have them every 100 yards or so so this was a video once all of the infrastructure came in together and we installed the system this was the very first alert that we received from the very first camera system that i installed this is in the middle of the night it's pitch black and you can see this guy this is the fence are all these poles you see going across the screen he's on the outside of the park right now he was touching the fence because it's electro electrified and he wanted to make sure that he he i mean it wasn't live or he could get shocked so he actually found a spot where he could cross and use the stick to short out the electric fence so the shock would go away and then climbed in the rangers were listening and watching this alert as it was happening in this control room and they radioed to the rangers and the rangers were able to respond and arrest this guy within two minutes and this area used to be what they called the highest risk part of a national park in kenya and rangers dreaded going here because there were always poaching incidences it was very dangerous they would always encounter dangerous poachers and with this system we basically took this this stretch of high risk park boundary and covered it with thermal cameras so they no longer had to worry about patrolling this 24 7 and with they just constantly protected this area and basically cut this took this area away from poachers because they had easy access there was roads that they could enter the enter the park poach and then leave easily i'm sorry we also use the again the drones for human wildlife conflict uh and then this is a video let me mute it this is video from a drone that we used um in malawi to push elephants back into the park this was what they call a human wildlife conflict hot spot where these elephants would go and raid a farm or they'd go in to eat the corn or the watermelon and just destroy the crops which is the livelihood of these people that lived near the park um and it's just a dangerous situation because you have what they call conflict-related poaching incidences where if the elephant comes and hurts somebody in the community obviously the community is going to get upset and they're going to potentially hurt the elephant so we try and respond or give the tools to the rangers to respond and push these elephants back into the protected area and you can see how right now that they're pushing the elephants back into the protected area to get them back to safety but also protect the community we're running a little close on time so we've gotta if you can um wrap it up in just about two minutes yep so i got uh only a couple more slides uh so with the the success that we showed with this technology one of the manufacturers of the or the makers or the companies that make these thermal cameras really saw the impact of their products or their technology and joined or we created this project called the kafaru rising project and we're basically trying to stop rhino poaching in kenya by scaling these thermal cameras that i just showed you to every national park or every protected area in kenya um and we with the goal of by 2022 will there'll be zero rhino coaching in kenya so one of the other things last point i wanted to make was when you when i first joined wwf i mean i was trying to understand the issues or before traveling to the sites i really didn't think about all the challenges that you would experience trying to install technology and that's i mean from the alice or from the wildlife uh whether it's baboons elephants insects bees whatever it might be is is also will be a threat to your technology and is most likely going to destroy it as soon as you put it out you have to come up with ideas or solutions to keep the wildlife away and keep your technology safe and this is a picture of one of the the towers that i put up in kenya and the baboon was climbed up on top of the solar panel and was jumping up and down and broke the panel off so the rangers actually came up on the right you'll see this grease or oily substance that the rangers put on the pole to keep the the baboons from climbing and it's these small simple ingenious solutions that actually make these projects successful and work in these protected areas and finally i just wanted to i guess highlight some of the things that i did when i was younger that kind of led to the career path but things that you can take advantage of now to start learning about this technology and actually playing around with it and making things there's plenty of open source projects online some good examples are arduino and raspberry pi and these are the types of computers that you can connect all the different sensors to and you can go online and find examples of just about every sensor that you can imagine or whatever it might be to connect to this computer to make your device or invention somebody has already posted how to do it you can also find what they call makerspaces and that's these engineering technology clubs where people get together and they have all the tools the 3d printers or whatever it might be to make these things so chances are near where you live there's one of these maker spaces that you can join and they also have competitions or hackathons where they try and create these or invent things to solve problems uh also the your schools most likely have stem kind of activities whether it's robotics competitions or clubs i also was involved in these growing up and that's really what sparked my interest and just started taking away the mystery of these engineering things it's people think it's a lot harder than it really is because it's all math and science but when you get down i mean get under the hood and actually do these things it's it's really a lot easier than you would imagine you guys are lucky because everything's online nowadays before you had to be the expert to understand and do all these engineering things but now you can just one quick internet search away from trying to figure out how to learn a new topic so you things like youtube and just the internet in general are a really good tool to to start pushing the limits of what you can do okay so thank you i know i went a little over time so sorry for taking so long but i'd like to open it up for questions kate yes we are ready for a few questions and we have just enough time to get some questions in here so um just a reminder those of you that are watching off camera you're going to use that chat box to put any questions that you have for eric and we're going to rotate here between questions that are in the chat and our groups on camera for those of you that are on camera our three groups we have here um just wait until i say your name and you'll know that it's your turn to ask a question we did discover that um you may have to unmute your microphone yourself i will ask you to unmute it and you'll see probably a button pop up on your screen um so that'll be your indication that it's your turn to talk so we're gonna get started with a question from the chat if that's okay with you eric um our first question here is from sophia who wants to know what do you love about your job oh i i love everything about it but i would say just getting to go to these these beautiful places um experiencing i guess nature all around the world um i mean just nature in general and if you get out in these into the forest or into these national parks you really come away inspired i mean pictures and video they're great to get inspired but they don't do it justice so i i would say just going to some of these places that just look fake because they're so beautiful they look like paintings and pictures and the other thing i guess working with um all the people on the ground all the local partners and rangers and just meeting different people from different cultures and um yeah just coming away inspired great so let's go to penelope and oakley if you guys can um on make sure you're unmuted and then go ahead and ask your question my first question is um have you ever been in danger while tracking an animal yeah i uh i'm always with rangers when i'm out there so i'm safe but i would say one of the scariest i've had two scary moments but the most scary was i was on foot patrol in kenya or walking in the national park with uh rangers in kenya and if you imagine a bunch of like it's almost like a desert area and there's these big thorny bushes everywhere so you can't really see what's behind everything and we came walking around this bush and these two lion cubs came running up to our feet and all of a sudden the rangers were just you could see they instantly were scared and they were saying just be still compose yourself compose yourself and all of a sudden the mama mama lion came walking around the corner and they they call it you have uh they either charge you an attack or it's what they call a mock charge where they're just going up to try and scare you and luckily this was a mom line that was just trying to scare us so she ran up and got maybe six feet away from me and roared um and i think that kind of i was thinking why am i here i'm an engineer i should be behind my desk but it was cool so it was a good experience that was one of the scary ones yeah that uh that sounds a little scary um we'll take another one from the chat here we have jj that wants to know what engineering tools do you think have been the most helpful for conservation um yeah i would again for like the engineering tools there's a lot of technology that you can utilize that's basically come from cell phones like cell phones nowadays they want to make your battery last longer there's also these internet of things where they want to have these smart smart houses and things connect that long range that lasts on a battery so i would say the the internet of things is really going to have the big impact from the technology side of things and artificial intelligence and the cloud computing because now you have these big super computers that everybody can use to do these really cool ai things um and then just the internet there's large communities we actually set up this website or forum called wildlabs.net and the goal of that is to have by our people in the field the biologists the rangers the researchers post their challenges online to connect with engineers or people interested in technology so it's the kind of open source or what they call open source or people sharing knowledge about technology so i would say anything open source as a benefit or a potential impact for for conservation just trying to deploy smart sensors like imagine smart home or trying to have smart parks okay let's go to robinson's heroes if you guys are ready um you are up next nice and loud for us my name is cheyenne thank you for taking my question my question is how do you know if the person you see is a poacher or not that's a that's a very good question sometimes you don't know if they're a poacher they may be somebody that just accidentally walked into the park they may have been disoriented or not so with with the cameras you can really if they are a poacher you can usually see them carrying something um whether that's like a weapon or something so you can generally tell and the way they act if you saw somebody that tries to run into the park real real suspiciously and run away and try and hide usually they're they're up to something bad but um it's hard to tell it's so that you really want to just make sure that the rangers have the tools so they can safely go and and talk to the person and just make sure that they aren't a poacher because it may be somebody from the community or village that's trying to go collect wood for fire to build a fire or whatever it might be but that's a good question it's hard to tell so it's you really need to give them the tools so they can see and understand what's happening that was a great question thank you for that um our next question comes from the chat from malia she wants to know when you make the technology how do you do it uh so it's it it's usually i mean it always involves a team of people so i mean all of us are smarter than one of us so it's usually not just me developing or coming up with the ideas but um it's just trying to we we try and come think outside the box to think of like what we call moon shots where you try and come up with these wacky ideas or potential solutions for to the problem and eventually you'll have or you have these brainstorming sessions and throw out these again weird or what might sound just way like futuristic or whatever it might be and you narrow down these ideas into where you can see like what what actually could exist or what might we need to modify to actually solve the problem but then i come you again do your background research um just a lot of googling trying to understand what what's out in the world what how do other people solve these problems one of the best things you could do is try and get as many perspectives to this issue as as possible so try and understand what other people did in similar situations or what other people are doing and i guess related topics just to come away i guess a little bit more smarter on what you're trying to do but then you go into the lab or machine shop or whatever it might be and do your design on the computer and then 3d print the parts or solder the circuit board like melt the the metal put the chips on the board uh and then put it together and test it and then if it works at home or in the lab and then we take it to the field and again we test it again and then eventually train the rangers on how to use it and maintain it i think that's great advice you know think big think outside the box um next up is miss kudrick's class if you guys are ready make sure you are unmuted here and whoever is going to be our question asker nice and loud for us do you make the technology camouflage for the animals so not neces so we camouflage it first so say you were a tourist and you were going into the national park you don't want to see a bunch of towers so sometimes we camouflage the actual equipment or the technology just so it doesn't have what we call a visual impact just so you can't look out and see it we camouflage most of the sensors to hide them from people or from the poachers we don't necessarily have to um camouflage it from the animals but we have to wildlife proof them so we have to put up the same like screen that you have at your windows at home we put that around any kind of vent or opening we do the grease thing we have to build big walls or put up these big electric fences to keep elephants from scratching against our towers so it's camouflaging from from people not necessarily from wildlife but we definitely have to protect the stuff from wildlife so yeah that was a good question okay i know we are running short on time so those of you that have to jump off um i understand we're gonna try to sneak in another round of questions really quickly if that's okay um back to penelope and oakley if you guys have another question go ahead what was the first year um what was the first animal you ever tracked you want to ask that my dear no he's going to answer the animal ask him what was the first animal that you tracked um so the first animal i developed before joining wwf i i designed a lot of satellite tracking devices so we tracked a lot of animals but me physically like walking tracking the animals it was with elephants um in the in a place called masai mara if you've ever seen video of wildebeest or zebra walking or walking across a river uh and then the alligators kind of trying to get them that's in this place and it's called the great land migration so you see millions of animals walking around it's amazing um but the first animal i tracked was on foot uh was an elephant and we had an app because the elephant had one of these satellite trackers and as we were walking around we could see on the app where the elephant was walking and we had followed it to where we walked up and were where it was five minutes ago and it was wasn't there and we saw the footprints so we started walking and following the footprints then again saw the saddle the tracker satellite tracker for gps gave us another track and it was even further around and we kept on doing this thing and then we realized that we had gone in a complete circle and the elephant was actually kind of going around and leading us on this little chase and it knew we were knew we were chasing it the whole time and we never found it so that that was the first wildlife or animal i tracked but i didn't actually see it they're smart elephants are really really smart oh yeah um we have a good question here that got put into the chat from team remote 5g they want to know what if the hunters are smart and destroyed the drones what happens then yeah so i mean it's it's a i don't know the whole anti-poaching stuff is is dangerous but with the drones if they did shoot at it there you have to imagine there's maybe one or two poachers and there's maybe 20 or 30 rangers the poachers are trying to hide the best they can so if they see a drone or hear anything chances are they're just going to hide because if they do shoot out the drone they instantly give away where they are and the rangers will be able to find them easier so a lot of times it's what they call a psychological deterrent so we put these things up because the the poachers realize that hey i better not go in there because there's these drones watching or there's these cameras um and another good example is i put up the the thermal cameras on this one high risk boundary but then along the rest of the the park boundary we just put up empty boxes that look like the cameras so this deterrent so if they damage those it doesn't matter but again they just we haven't seen it where they they destroy the equipment or heard it be and we think that's because they are and we actually have heard from poachers that it's because they don't want to give away where they are because they want to stay hidden that was a good question yeah one last comment it's with the they call it perception of risk so if you realize that it's harder and harder and scarier to get your reward like say you're trying to get elephant ivory if it's so hard and you know that you're going to get caught you're not going to go in there so what we're trying to do is just build this this what they call perception of risk to just scare the poachers away okay robinson's heroes whoever's up next to ask a question um my name's bella and i was gonna say what is the best moment when you are in the field that's a very good question um seeing when i when i first tested the the technology with the rangers seeing their response seeing how excited they were and how they felt invincible now because they have this camera that can see everything at nighttime so it was really just being really happy to see these rangers use this tool that that i was bringing them but as far as i mean i one of the places i work with they have an elephant orphanage and there's actually a movie it was i can't remember the name of the movie with kristen stewart and rob lowe but there was a movie on netflix about this elephant orphanage that we work with holiday in the wild um i work that when i showed that picture of the lake and talked about the island that's near this elephant orphanage so just the ability for me or what the experience of going and being with these baby elephants is pretty magical so i'd say baby elephants and seeing the rangers use the tool and be excited okay i think we're gonna take we have just a few minutes left here um we're going to take one more from the chat and then wrap it up with miss kudrick's class and then for all of you that had questions that we didn't get to you can always email them to the wild classroom email address there wildclassroom wwfus.org so our next one that was put into the chat is from the castros4 wants to know what is the most endangered species you have worked with oh that's another good question there it seems like there's endangered species everywhere nowadays um one of the species i helped with the technology to conserve is these um it's actually north america's most endangered mammal and it's this black-footed ferret and it's in what they call the northern great plains or like montana colorado wyoming those types of places um i think i can't remember the exact number and we can get back to you on that but i know that there's i mean in the range of hundreds we also work with the java rhino and the sumatran rhino which there's only a handful of them left um yeah i don't know it's it's sad to say oh one last one was maybe the northern white rhino um which is in the the last remaining ones are in kenya and we put up this same camera system around there and there's only there's three of them left now so i'd say the northern white rhino actually okay mrs kudrick's class you guys are our last question asker here if you just want to make sure you are unmuted and then nice and loud for us what is your best success story i'm sorry what was that um what is your best story successfully um did you ask what was that story oh okay my best success story oh um i don't know it's i i'd say being able to scale or take piloting testing one technology in one park in in a country in kenya um or a country like kenya testing that one one piece of technology taking it through all these trial and errors getting it working and then having the company that makes the technology donate a lot of equipment so we can scale it up or we can take that same technology that we tested at one place and take it to all the parks that have rhinos so i would say it's scaling this this this technology um and just doing it engineering for wildlife and getting i mean this opportunity to have a job like this cool well i think um that is about it for today we went a little overtime but i hope everyone was able to hang in there with us like i said if you have questions for eric that we didn't get to that you would still like to have him answer you can email them to wildclassroom wwfus.org and we'd be happy to pass them along to eric to try to get some answers back to you um teachers and parents just a reminder if you are interested in having some additional resources on this topic you can visit the conservation the classroom web page same place where you registered um there's different web articles and videos and there's also a kahoot trivia quiz with the game pin for you to play if you're unfamiliar with kahoot it's a free quiz platform you don't have to have an account or anything you just head over to the website enter the pin code you'll find the information on our website there so eric thank you so much for spending some time with us today to teach us all about your cool job i'm going to unmute everyone's microphone here if you guys can say hi and thank you to aaron thank you thank you thanks guys nice day bye