South Sudan's English Daily Newspaper
"We Dare where others fear"
By Awan Achiek
The Ministry of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism in partnership with African Parks have adopted the use of technology to track and monitor wildlife movements in Boma-Badingilo National Park to curb encroachment on protected areas, poaching, and deforestation.
Anthony Abang John, the Control Room Operator and Survey Observer with African Park told journalists during a visit on Wednesday that they are using modern technology to boost monitoring and respond to threats facing wildlife species.
“What I do inside is monitoring the animals, the species, and their specific locations. I also track our personnel who are in the field,” Abang said, adding that surveillance of wildlife has led to reduction in poaching.
“We have software that we use for tracking. So we have the Earth Ranger. Earth Ranger software is basically for tracking gammon devices like Motorola or radios.”
Abang said they are relying on applications like SpyderTrack to track planes and monitor their movement.
“That’s the system that we do use for tracking personnel also on the ground because we do give them radios or maybe gammon devices that we can track through Earth Ranger,” he said.
Joseph Bith Lognar, another Control Room Operator said technologies help to monitor and locate wild animals.
“So our work is to monitor the daily operation of African Parks. That’s ranging from aircraft, vehicle movements, patrols, rangers’ movements, and all other logistics that are supposed to be used by the African Parks operation,” Bith said.
He said the tools such as Spider Track, Arc Ranger, Google Maps, and Google Earth are effective in monitoring different animals such as Wild elk, Mangala gazelle, elephant, lions, giraffe, reed bugs, inlands, and all other ecosystems.
Major Butrous Simon, Acting Warden of Badingilo National Park underscored the significant role technology plays in solving human-wildlife conflict within the ecosystem.
“Before people were killing wildlife anytime, anywhere, and we had no access to them because of the logistics. But now we have helicopters, we have vehicles, we have communications, and we can track the animals,” Simon said.
Simon said they are maintaining and conserving wildlife for the future generation.
“The world will know that we are having wildlife and a great variety of animals only in South Sudan. Through the steps that we are doing with African Parks, there is a future. There is a guarantee that this wildlife will not be killed,” he disclosed.
In August 2022, the Ministry of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism inked a 10-year-agreement with African Parks worth 10 million U.S. dollars to rehabilitate and manage its national parks.
The deal will ensure proper protection of wildlife species and improve infrastructure in national parks.
African Parks is a non-profit conservation organization that takes on direct responsibility for the rehabilitation and long-term management of protected areas in partnership with governments and local communities.