An elephant is poached (on average) every 15 minutes in Africa.
The poachers are often not of the local area, and roam between parks based on how easy the target seems. After a kill, they usually get out quickly and pass the ivory to a smuggler bound for China. China's demand for traditional medicine and ivory drives almost all of this poaching.
The poachers don't end up making a ton of money (though it's still very high by African standards), but the smugglers and other folks net millions of dollars.
I went and spoke with some folks in Tanzania about aerial/drone enforcement last year. Corruption is endemic in most of the countries, and so often these poachers have agreements with one (or many) of the local park rangers. Also, many of the elephants are killed outside of the park boundaries, since they are used to walking hundreds of miles between different parks (only recently, elephant generation-wise, has human habitation started to prevent that).
An ideal solution would be to kill demand, though that will probably never happen. Vilifying traditional medicine and ivory in China is just not feasible in the time remaining.
Technological solutions (drones, tracking, etc) would have to be enforced at a country level to avoid local corruption issues. It will probably not help with elephants outside of reserves, though they are getting killed off fast enough that the elephants are learning to stay put (which is kind of sad, changing thousands of years of migratory patterns). Often these kills are in densely wooded areas, but other than that drone enforcement should help, in theory.
Today, there is some aerial surveillance, but it is not sufficient for spotting poachers at night. There are also plenty of other people who transit through parks (people fishing the streams, etc), and it is hard to differentiate. Multi-spectral (at least IR) and computer vision will probably be needed to pick out a truck amidst thousands of square miles of area.
The poachers are often not of the local area, and roam between parks based on how easy the target seems. After a kill, they usually get out quickly and pass the ivory to a smuggler bound for China. China's demand for traditional medicine and ivory drives almost all of this poaching.
The poachers don't end up making a ton of money (though it's still very high by African standards), but the smugglers and other folks net millions of dollars.
I went and spoke with some folks in Tanzania about aerial/drone enforcement last year. Corruption is endemic in most of the countries, and so often these poachers have agreements with one (or many) of the local park rangers. Also, many of the elephants are killed outside of the park boundaries, since they are used to walking hundreds of miles between different parks (only recently, elephant generation-wise, has human habitation started to prevent that).
An ideal solution would be to kill demand, though that will probably never happen. Vilifying traditional medicine and ivory in China is just not feasible in the time remaining.
Technological solutions (drones, tracking, etc) would have to be enforced at a country level to avoid local corruption issues. It will probably not help with elephants outside of reserves, though they are getting killed off fast enough that the elephants are learning to stay put (which is kind of sad, changing thousands of years of migratory patterns). Often these kills are in densely wooded areas, but other than that drone enforcement should help, in theory.
Today, there is some aerial surveillance, but it is not sufficient for spotting poachers at night. There are also plenty of other people who transit through parks (people fishing the streams, etc), and it is hard to differentiate. Multi-spectral (at least IR) and computer vision will probably be needed to pick out a truck amidst thousands of square miles of area.
Rambling post, apologies.