Fulcrum is a mobile app developed in St Petersburg in Florida, USA that has been tweaked to help fight animal poaching in East Africa.
The app Fulcrum was originally designed to be used by municipalities and businesses to collect field data and forms. However in Kenya, it has been tweaked to help track down the location of elephants’ ivory and rhinos’ horns smugglers.
The app works by sharing information quickly among game rangers leading to their swift reaction to curb poaching before they kill other animals. Fulcrum is part of an initiative, tenBoma being piloted by the NGO International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). The app identifies, maps out and destroys poaching networks.
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IFAW President Azzedine Downes said, “IFAW’s tenBoma project is taking the lessons learned from counter-terrorism and applying them to wildlife protection. Fulcrum is a powerful new weapon being used in the battle to destroy poaching networks.
With patrols using Fulcrum-equipped smartphones, these teams traverse the plains looking for poachers and plot observations on a real-time map shared with authorities and game rangers. The information is then used to form essential data analysis which is shared out with local law enforcement and communities around the affected area.”
Dr. John Konarski, the Chief Executive of American Geographical Society, say tenBoma is one of the most important internationally-ran projects steered at addressing the menace of illegal wildlife trade.
Dr. Konarski said, “The work of the Fulcrum team on the tenBoma initiative is recognized worldwide as a model for combating the effects of illegal wildlife trafficking on global security. The experts at Fulcrum and their smartphone technology lead the industry in having a real and practical impact on fighting terrorism and protecting our wildlife.”
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