Articles by Rhett Butler

The Conservation Drones Summit hosted by the California Academy of Sciences is being streamed live on Periscope by Bryson Voirin. You can watch here. You can also follow the event…

Global Forest Watch, a platform that maps a wide range of forest data, is now optimized for mobile users, potentially extending the tool for ground-based forest monitoring and deforestation detection.…

Laurel Neme reported on a gathering of the world's wildlife forensic scientists in Montana When border agents seize two tons of smuggled ivory, how do they tell where it's from?…

Legal or illegal? Technology can help. Photo by Rhett Butler. Seven years ago, Brazil’s São Paulo State Environmental Police set out to crack down on the illegal timber trade. In…

Most African elephant ivory is from a very few places African elephant eating savanna grass in Tanzania. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. A study published last week in Science showed…

A very alert snow leopard. Photo credit: Bernard Landgraf, Wikimedia Commons. Conservation work is important not just in tropical rainforests, but also in snow-covered peaks and steep slopes, the home…

With new GPS technology, researchers can pinpoint the location of their subject to within a few meters, at any given time, and learn when an animal's movements are out of the ordinary.

. An outfit usually associated with investigating arms dealers and weapons traffickers is applying its advanced network mapping capabilities to criminal wildlife trafficking syndicates. This week Washington D.C.-based C4ADS unveiled…

Think of it as trying to help the long-lost cousins who never left your home town. Researchers and friends at the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) are doing just that for…

CAO lasers easily penetrate forest canopies to reveal minute variations in ground elevation associated with soils. This images shows a ground elevation map in dense tropical forest of western Amazon.…

Simple, automated speaker systems can help keep elephants out of agricultural areas Elephants in Namibia. The search for effective measures to reduce human-elephant conflict is a top priority for wildlife…

Landsat image showing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. With scientists rapidly adopting and using a range of remote sensing tools for monitoring environmental change, tracking wildlife and measuring biological processes,…

Altamira municipality. Courtesy of Google Earth. Brazilian municipalities are planning to use drones to map properties and monitor forest cover as they move to step up enforcement of the country's…

Innovation in Tropical Forest Conservation: Q&A with Lian Pin Koh Collage of photos showing orangutan nests taken from a conservation drone. Photo courtesy of ConservationDrones.org. At the foothills of the…

Deforestation mapping goes global with Stanford's free online training platform Efforts to map and analyze deforestation and forest degradation got a boost today when Stanford University announced a new online…

The use of small autonomous flying vehicles — model airplanes to hobbyists — is revolutionizing the field of conservation, enabling researchers to track wildlife, monitor for poachers, and survey inaccessible…

One of the coolest endeavors I've come across in recent years of reporting has been the effort to develop "conservation drones" — model aircraft that are now being used to…

Call recognition for animals. New technology makes it possible to automatically identify species by their vocalizations. The software and hardware system, detailed in the current issue of the journal PeerJ,…

Orangutan as photographed by a conservation drone. Courtesy of Lian Pin Koh. Google.org, Google Corp's philanthropic arm, earlier this month pledged $5 million toward efforts combat wildlife poaching. The grant…

Koh and Wich testing their drone in Switzerland. The conservation drone has been equipped with various cameras including the GoPro HD Hero video camera, the Canon IXUS 220 HS, and…