For years, monitoring water levels in the semiarid Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya was a tedious task. Team members would travel the 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the main office to the nature preserve to ensure that water levels were adequate enough for use by the animals that live there, including the last two northern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) on Earth. When, in 2021, the team installed digital water meters to enable remote monitoring, they ran into a hurdle. The data output couldn’t be read by EarthRanger, a monitoring and analysis platform widely used to collate and visualize real-time data gathered from multiple tracking and monitoring devices. It’s an issue that has plagued conservationists and organizations that use multiple devices and software to track animals, monitor the safety of rangers on patrols, and visualize enormous data sets. Popular equipment such as telemetry devices, camera traps and audio recorders are produced by multiple manufacturers from around the world. Often, it takes a lot of time, money and resources to convert data from each of these devices and integrate them into platforms where they can be stored and analyzed. A new open-source tool aims to resolve this compatibility issue and enable conservationists, protected-area managers and researchers to deploy tools without worrying about whether the data produced will be usable. Gundi, which means “glue” in Swahili, is a result of a collaboration between EarthRanger and the nonprofit organizations Wildlife Protection Solutions and the Wildlife Conservation Society. At Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Gundi has…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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