Geotagging Safari Photo and Endangered Animals
28 May 2015Geotagging at safaris, sadly, puts endangered animals at risk.
Technology has come full circle, and unfortunately it is putting animals at risk. While advanced technology, like GPS tracking, can be great for protecting endangered animals and finding out more about their behaviors and habits, the same technology can also put them in danger.
The main culprit of this is geotagging, which provides the user with geographical location based on some type of media, such as a photograph, video, or QR codes. Geotagging is often used to help find images for a certain location by entering the latitude and longitude coordinates into a search engine.
It can also be used the other way, by taking a photo or video and being able to get the approximate coordinates for that image. If you find a picture of an event or a beautiful flower, you can utilize Geotagging to know where it took place. This is unfortunately how poachers are able to track down endangered animals when someone else takes a picture of them.
What happens is someone seemingly innocent takes a picture while out on safari of an endangered animal, such as a rhino or elephant. If the person uses their smartphone with GPS tracking enables to take the picture, geotagging allows others to know the exact coordinates for where the animal was when the picture was taken. This then gives poachers a better idea of the location of the animal so they can attempt to track down the animal once the safari is closed for the night.
While many poachers send in people purposely to do geotagging with their safari pictures, others are tourists who do it by accident. Many GPS-enabled smartphones and digital cameras track the location automatically when their pictures are taken. They then upload the picture to the Internet and a poacher finds it through an image search. Many social media sites also have geotags for all images, further giving them ways to track down the animal.
Rhinos, which have been the victims of geotagging, are at great risk of becoming endangered. Their horns have special powers to people of Asia, causing many people in South Africa to tracking down and killing them. In 2013, there was a 42 percent increase of the endangered rhinos as compared to the year before. A lot of these animals exist only at safaris in certain parts of the world, where of course tourists want to get a picture. If it is somewhere that poachers can reach, they use those innocent images to track them down.
The best thing people can do is learn more about geotagging and how to turn it off from their smartphones or digital cameras, in order to protect endangered animals.
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