Sign up for our daily briefing
Make your busy days simpler with Axios AM/PM. Catch up on what's new and why it matters in just 5 minutes.
Catch up on coronavirus stories and special reports, curated by Mike Allen everyday
Catch up on coronavirus stories and special reports, curated by Mike Allen everyday
Denver news in your inbox
Catch up on the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Denver
Des Moines news in your inbox
Catch up on the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Des Moines
Minneapolis-St. Paul news in your inbox
Catch up on the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Twin Cities
Tampa Bay news in your inbox
Catch up on the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Tampa Bay
Charlotte news in your inbox
Catch up on the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Charlotte
Gene J. Puskar / AP
Endangered elephants in Africa are being tracked in real-time using GPS, accelerometers and algorithms to protect them from poachers, Scientific American reports.
How it works: GPS combined with algorithms developed for analyzing data collected by the collars can detect if an elephant stops moving or slows down (indicating it could be injured or dead), or when it heads in the direction of a well-known poaching area.
Paul Allen's Vulcan and the non-profit Save the Elephants developed an app that sends alerts to rangers so they can intervene when a potential problem arises. The app provides positions of other rangers, camera trap feeds, gunshot detection and more. Batian Craig, director of a company that oversees security at Lew Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya, told SciAm it is "a game changer."
Elephant endangerment: Between 2007 and 2014, the savanna elephant population dropped by 30%; the forest elephants dropped by 62% between 2002 and 2011.