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This may help at a policy level, but I feel like it is solving the wrong problem. Most of the time, poaching is easy to discover because there is a dead elepha

This may help at a policy level, but I feel like it is solving the wrong problem. Most of the time, poaching is easy to discover because there is a dead elephant on the ground missing its tusks. These game parks already know they have a problem, and often it is facilitated by an insider. One way it could be useful is if you can trace a set of ivory back to a single poaching network, to understand the network's reach.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
Although if you have limited anti-poaching resources, knowing the area to concentrate in can have an outsized effect on your ability to catch poachers. Elephants have a tremendous range and it is impossible to monitor all of it.
fit2rule 11y ago
>One way it could be useful is if you can trace a set of ivory back to a single poaching network, to understand the network's reach. And that is exactly what they're doing - mapping the ivory trade back to the regions where its occurring, so that they can indeed find out where the network operates and therefore allocate resources to stopping it. Discovering that a majority of the tusks came from a particular park is stopping the network where it operates. Governments can go to those parks and start their investigation into why there is so much ivory coming from their area - uprooting the corrupt networks that allow it to occur.