This is an idea proposed in 2024 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Charles Emogor. It is supervised by Andrew Balmford and Anil Madhavapeddy as part of my Mapping LIFE on Earth project.
There is an important balance needed between the biodiversity damage caused by hunting in protected areas and the well-being of local communities that depend on it. One understudied driver of overly damaging hunting in these areas is snaring (as opposed to gun hunting) which potentially increases carcass wastage and hence causing biodiversity harm without proportionate benefit to the community.
This project examines how to improve the efficacy of anti-poaching ranger patrols while also plugging the knowledge gap around wild meat snaring. Both of these research topics can be tackled in a new light with the emergence of machine learning as a data-driven approach to deriving insights from sparse data, and particularly from some of the newer base maps being developed in our Mapping LIFE on Earth project.