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SUNDAY SCIENCE: SIGNS OF SCIENCE  
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Dimitri Selibas
June 13, 2024
Science
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_ CyberTracker, software developed in collaboration with Indigenous
trackers, is enabling almost anyone to collect complex biodiversity
data _

Indigenous trackers, preparing here to hunt in the Kalahari Desert,
have played an important role in developing, testing, and improving
CyberTracker Online software., Marcus Reynerson

 

THE NYAE NYAE CONSERVANCY IN NAMIBIA—In a clearing here on the
eastern fringe of the Kalahari Desert, four men intently examine
animal tracks snaking through dry yellow grass and leafless thorn
bushes. “Wild dogs. Six of them took down an impala 2 days ago and
they dragged it,” says /Ui G/Aqo*
[[link removed]],
a master tracker and member of the Indigenous Ju/’hoansi group
that has lived on these lands for millennia.

G≠kao Tsamkxao, an apprentice tracker, starts to measure the tracks
with a ruler. Debe enters the measurements into a smartphone and snaps
photos. After the trackers return to camp, they will upload the
information to a database available to people around the world.

The September 2023 training exercise was, in part, an opportunity for
Tsamkxao and a second apprentice, N!Ani /Ui, to make progress toward
earning a certification as a master tracker—a specialist in the
ancient art of recognizing and interpreting the tracks, gouges,
scrapes, and other signs left behind by the region’s many animals.
But it was also an experiment of sorts: an opportunity to field test
CyberTracker Online, a new conservation data platform that aims to
ease collaborations between Indigenous communities, scientists, and
conservation managers. The goal is to empower almost anyone equipped
with a smartphone—even people who can’t read or write—“to
generate very rich and complex biodiversity data,” says Louis
Liebenberg, founder of CyberTracker Conservation
[[link removed]], the South Africa–based nonprofit that
developed the platform and the tracker certification program.

Some 600,000 people in 150 nations have already downloaded older
versions of CyberTracker, which Liebenberg started developing in the
1990s. Communities have used it to survey wildlife, monitor water
resources, and map cultural sites. The tool has also helped
conservationists manage vulnerable species and reserves and provided
scientists with data used in numerous peer-reviewed publications on
wildlife populations and behavior—including some co-authored by
Indigenous trackers.

But the technology had limitations. Some users found navigating and
customizing the software difficult, and they could lose valuable data
if a smartphone or tablet got damaged or destroyed, a common hazard in
fieldwork. So last year, Liebenberg began testing a new version that
has a friendlier interface and uploads vulnerable field data to remote
cloud storage instead of keeping it on a single device. The testing,
done in partnership with Indigenous communities such as the
Ju/’hoansi, is meant to ensure the technology meets local cultural
and economic needs, preserves their knowledge, and promotes science.

Such partnerships are increasingly important, conservationists say,
given growing evidence that the nearly 400 million people living in
Indigenous communities around the world play a key role in managing
landscapes and protecting biodiversity. “We’re talking about
cocreating knowledge, codeveloping solutions, and CyberTracker allows
you to do just that,” says Katarzyna Cieslik, a development
specialist at the University of Manchester who has been studying the
use of CyberTracker by communities in Kyrgyzstan
[[link removed]].
“Empowerment happens when the community actually takes charge.”

LAST YEAR’S RELEASE of CyberTracker marks the latest turn in
Liebenberg’s eclectic and unusual career. The 64-year-old South
African has no formal academic training in technology, development, or
conservation—although in 2007 Harvard University named him an
associate of human evolutionary biology. But growing up in Cape Town,
he became fascinated by the San peoples of the Kalahari, renowned for
their tracking skills. During childhood holidays at the beach, he
recalls trying to track a friend’s footprints through the dunes.

Tracker /Ui /Kunta uses a smartphone loaded with CyberTracker Online
software to record observations in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in
Namibia. MARCUS REYNERSON

In 1980, Liebenberg began to study physics and math at the University
of Cape Town. While taking a course in the history and philosophy of
science, he became fascinated by what he calls an “evolutionary
paradox.” Scientific reasoning, he was taught, began with the
ancient Greek philosophers. But how, he wondered, did humans evolve
the ability to think scientifically if such reasoning wasn’t
necessary for their survival earlier, as hunter-gatherers? Liebenberg
dropped out of university to seek an answer. He was propelled, he
says, by an “intuitive gut feeling” that tracking—which involves
using observations to form hypotheses about animal behavior—helped
lay the foundations of modern science. Over the next decade, he began
to study and draw animal tracks, traveled to the central Kalahari in
Botswana to study with !Nam!kabe Molote, a !Xõ master tracker, and
spent long periods in the field with trackers as they hunted game.

Today, bows, arrows, and ostrich-shell necklaces from the Kalahari
adorn the walls of Liebenberg’s home office in Noordhoek, a
semirural suburb of Cape Town. He wears a necklace that holds the tip
of the horn of a kudu killed during a “persistence hunt,” which
involved chasing the animal for some 25 kilometers during the hottest
part of the day until it collapsed from hyperthermia. Liebenberg says
his foolhardy effort to follow that chase would have killed him, too,
if a tracker named !Nate had not risked hyperthermia himself by
running back to their camp for help. “He risked his life to save
mine,” Liebenberg says.

The office is also stuffed with books, including some written by
Liebenberg. Over the past 35 years, he’s produced three guides to
tracking that describe animal habits and habitats and how to interpret
tracks and spoor. And in 1990, Liebenberg published a volume, expanded
and updated in 2013, that details his idea that tracking contributed
to the beginnings of science. The reasoning process required to track
an animal helps “explain how the human mind evolved the innate
ability to do science,” he wrote. “It is easy to see how natural
selection” would have favored people with tracking skills, he adds.

While living with the Kalahari San, however, Liebenberg learned
tracking was a dying skill. Game populations had diminished;
Indigenous trackers could no longer survive by hunting and needed
jobs. At the time, just one veteran tracker remained and young people
were showing little interest in learning the skill. At that point,
“My whole research pivoted,” Liebenberg recalls, to figuring out
how he could help preserve tracking skills and use them to benefit
trackers, their communities—and scientists.

South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 1990s gave Liebenberg
an opportunity. He helped produce a report
[[link removed]] on
how national parks could benefit nearby communities that informed
policies adopted by the postapartheid government of former President
Nelson Mandela. In 1994, Liebenberg built on that work by launching a
program that trains people in tracking and offers a certification
aimed at helping them find jobs in tourism and conservation. Since
then, some 10,000 people have completed the training.

Dam Debe (far right) coordinates a program developed by Louis
Liebenberg (left) that trains people in how to interpret tracks left
by animals and enter observations in the CyberTracker Online software.
MARCUS REYNERSON

At about the same time, Liebenberg began to work with trackers to
develop the first version of CyberTracker. From the beginning, the
idea was to create an intuitive, icon-based interface that would
enable nonliterate users to collect detailed data on GPS devices. When
in the field, for example, the user could select an icon in the shape
of a track to identify the kind of animal—whether it was made by a
hoofed creature, one with padded feet, a bird, or a reptile. Then,
users could input the number of animals; differentiate between males,
females, and juveniles; and add the kind of habitat, such as dry
grassland or wet forest. GPS links enabled the software to record the
location of each observation, easing the task of making maps and
analyzing the data.

An early field test came in 1996, when Karel Benadie, an Indigenous
tracker collaborating with Liebenberg, and a colleague used
CyberTracker to record the behavior of endangered black rhinoceros in
South Africa’s Karoo National Park; the data were later published
in _Pachyderm
[[link removed]]_.
Two years later, CyberTracker got a boost when it won a prestigious
Rolex Award for Enterprise, which came with a $50,000 prize and, more
importantly, publicity. The recognition enabled Liebenberg to raise
additional funds, including a €2 million grant from the European
Union to improve CyberTracker and make it free to all. The aim,
Liebenberg says, was to “not only democratize science itself, but to
also make it affordable.”

USERS SOON FLOCKED to CyberTracker. One of the earliest adopters was
South Africa’s national park system. In the 2-million-hectare Kruger
National Park, for example, 400 rangers now use the app to record a
wide range of observations, including data on biodiversity, invasive
species, surface water availability, breaks in fence lines, and
evidence of poachers (such as human footprints).

“I take CyberTracker along with me when I go out for anything,”
says Richard Sowry, a Kruger section ranger who manages a 15-person
team that monitors some 100,000 hectares of the park. Sowry has used
CyberTracker since 2006, making him the park’s longest running user.
Rangers once recorded information in logbooks, he says, where it often
“went into the abyss.” In contrast, he says, CyberTracker’s
digital data sets are easy to share and make it possible for
conservation managers to see patterns and work more strategically. 
For example, Sowry was able to better plan antipoaching patrols after
CyberTracker data showed illegal hunting surged in the dry season. He
says managers also use CyberTracker data to demonstrate the park’s
value to local communities and funding agencies, for example as a
source of culturally important resources such as the leaves of the
lala palm, used to make mats and baskets.

CyberTracker Online software (left) uses icons to make it easier for
nonliterate users to enter data about observations, such as sightings
of elephant tracks (right). DIMITRI SELIBAS

CyberTracker also won admirers in the public health community after it
helped provide an early warning of Ebola outbreaks in Gabon and the
Republic of Congo. Twice, wildlife researchers were able to alert
health authorities that Ebola was likely spreading after CyberTracker
data showed a “significant drop” in populations of gorillas,
chimpanzees, wild pigs, and other animals also affected by the virus,
researchers reported in 2016 in _Biological Conservation
[[link removed]]_. (The authors
of that paper included Liebenberg and two trackers.)

In Kyrgyzstan, Cieslik says communities have “loved” using
CyberTracker for conservation efforts, with residents creating maps of
“things they saw, including fungi, plants, and heritage sites, which
were displayed in the villages.” Ironically, some communities also
wanted to use the tool to help track and kill wolves that threatened
livestock. But Cieslik says that twist actually highlights one of the
technology’s advantages: its flexibility. “People can adapt it to
their needs in the present moment,” she says.

In Australia, CyberTracker has been adopted by many Indigenous ranger
and community groups, as well as local governments and academic
researchers, says ecologist Emilie Ens, who leads the Cross-Cultural
Ecology and Environmental Management Lab at Macquarie University.
Since 2010, she and her colleagues have published 12 papers that
cite CyberTracker data
[[link removed]] on
topics including how feral buffalo and pigs are affecting wetlands and
the habits of wildlife in remote parts of Australia.

In northern Australia, Yirralka Rangers (from left) Sarah Gurrundul
Marawili, Rena Djarrka Wanambi, and Kathy Djurrayun Murrunyina use
CyberTracker Online to record water quality measurements and other
data. EMILIE ENS

As CyberTracker grew in popularity, however, so did a wish list of
possible improvements. Users often needed outside technical
assistance, for example, if they wanted to customize the interface or
synchronize devices used in the field with other computers. And the
data were vulnerable. “If the tablet falls into a creek … [or]
gets stomped on by a buffalo, you lose the data,” Ens says.

To address such problems, nearly a decade ago Liebenberg began to plan
improvements, including making the interface even more accessible to
people who aren’t literate. It’s not just about selecting icons
that are easy to interpret, Liebenberg says. “It’s understanding
the underlying flow from screen to screen,” and enabling it to
better reflect the information-gathering sequence used by trackers in
the field.

After some delays, in April 2023 CyberTracker was finally ready for
wide testing. To give it a real-world workout, Liebenberg turned to
the Ju/’hoansi trackers.

DURING THE SEPTEMBER 2023 training exercise the trackers didn’t
just test the software. Because they were in the only part of the
Kalahari where bow-and-arrow hunting is still allowed, the men had
also come prepared to hunt big game. When the team spotted a group of
blue wildebeest in a clump of trees, N!Ani /Ui, the apprentice
tracker, pulled from his quiver an arrow tipped with a deadly poison
extracted from beetle larvae. He stayed low and downwind as he stalked
the herd. But his shot went wide and the wildebeest scattered.

The testing went better. The trackers plugged in data on a herd of
roan antelope, then a single male cheetah. In a sandy area, they
spotted giant oval impressions with intricate, treelike
lines—indications a large herd of elephants had moved through, 22 to
be exact, mostly females and babies. The trackers also found signs of
eland (a type of antelope), ostrich, aardwolf, bat-eared foxes, and
other animals.

In South Africa’s Kruger National Park, field rangers use
CyberTracker Online to monitor wildlife and support efforts to deter
poaching. RICHARD SOWRY

Overall, the software worked smoothly, enabling the trackers to work
efficiently as they moved across the landscape. By midday, it was too
hot to continue tracking and the team returned to camp. In this remote
corner of Namibia, successfully uploading the data required the
trackers to climb a wooden ladder leaning on a thatch hut and stretch
their arms to raise the phone as high as possible to gain a signal.

Later, in Liebenberg’s office, a digital map displayed an array of
colorful dots, indicating the species spotted by the Ju/’hoansi
within a roughly 10-kilometer-square area. By combining those data
with other information, such as how much time the trackers spent in
the field and the distance they walked, researchers and the
Ju/’hoansi should be able to estimate the overall abundance
[[link removed]] of
specific species—and, over time, track how populations are changing.

Enabling local people to document such trends could help Liebenberg
realize one of his long-term goals: using CyberTracker to help
Indigenous communities earn revenue. Australia, for example, last year
adopted legislation that could enable communities to collect payments
for protecting forests and wildlife, and CyberTracker data could play
a key role in such programs. In Africa, the software is already easing
the ability of trackers to get paid: For example, Debe, the Kalahari
tracker, uses it to upload invoices for monitoring projects and
tracking schools.

Farmers, too, could become important users of CyberTracker. Liebenberg
has been surprised to discover, for example, that farmers in Colombia
are downloading the app. One recorded more than 30,000 observations
related to crop pollination. That raises the possibility, Liebenberg
says, that some farmers might be willing to pay a small fee for
customized features, helping keep the app free for other users.

In the meantime, the Ju/’hoansi trackers say their decadeslong
involvement with Liebenberg and CyberTracker has produced results.
Tracker /Ukxa Qam says the app has prompted many to learn to identify
and pay greater attention to nongame animals, including rare and
endangered species such as the pangolin
[[link removed]].
Six Ju/’hoansi have become master trackers, with an additional eight
trackers in the process of qualifying. Some have become co-authors on
scientific papers.

Tracker /Ui G/aqo (left) digs up beetle larvae used to create a poison
placed on the tips of hunting arrows. Tracker /Ui /Kunta (right) shows
off a haul of larvae. MARCUS REYNERSON

For his part, Liebenberg sees devices loaded with CyberTracker as a
way to help draw a younger generation that grew up with smartphones
into observing the natural world. The Ju/’hoansi, he notes, have a
long tradition of adapting new technologies to their needs, from
fashioning arrow tips out of fence wire to using plastic pipes as
quivers to keep poison arrows dry during the wet season. Using a
smartphone during tracking is no different, he says.

At the end of the day, the trackers who tested the technology seemed
to agree. Gathered around a fire as elephants trumpeted at a nearby
watering hole, some of the trackers watched movies or played video
games on smartphones as they heated water for tea. Thanks to
CyberTracker, /Ukxa Qam said, “People are seeing our culture,” and
learning from it, too.

_DIMITRI SELIBAS is a writer in Cape Town, South Africa._

_SCIENCE MAGAZINE. 
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The West Has a 15-month Opportunity for a New Nuclear Deal with Iran
That Precludes an Iranian Bomb
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By Seyed Hossein Mousavian 
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
June 11, 2024

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