ACADEMIA

IBM has announced how it is working with Marwell Wildlife, a conservation charity, to help secure a future for Grevy's zebra, an endangered species with less than 2,500 individuals in the wild.

Predictive analytics is playing a key role in helping conserve wildlife in northern Kenya. Marwell Wildlife is conducting a survey on Grevy's zebra where local nomadic herdsmen are interviewed about their attitudes towards the zebras, what they think the key threats facing them are and where they think they are within this large area. The herdsmen have very good knowledge about wildlife and interviewing them is a very efficient means of collecting information over this vast and inaccessible area.

Marwell Wildlife selected IBM predictive analytics software to help identify patterns and analyse data which will help inform decisions on conservation measures for Grevy's zebra.

By improving Marwell's insight into herders' attitudes through the surveys, and combining this with information from aerial surveys, camera traps and radio collars on the zebras, Marwell now has a more detailed understanding of the issues surrounding the zebra and are therefore able to understand the main threats facing the species, which allows limited conservation resources to be focused towards these areas.

For example, one of the main reasons for hunting is to produce traditional medicines from the zebra's body fat. If herding communities were able to access modern medicines then the need for hunting would be much reduced.

"The IBM predictive analytics software is critical in analysing the information we collect from the field. The data from the surveys is vast and complex and requires powerful software to analyse it. The software is ideal for identifying trends and patterns from this data," said Dr. Guy Parker, Head of Biodiversity Management at Marwell Wildlife. "In the case of the recent interview survey, the software enabled us to determine peoples' attitudes towards the Grevy's zebra. Furthermore, we were able to determine what influence factors such as education level, age, location, and wildlife benefits had upon peoples' attitudes. This is the kind of complex multi-variate analysis that the IBM predictive analytics software is designed to tackle."

"The work at Marwell Wildlife takes the use of analytics to a whole new level," said Colin Shearer, predictive analytics strategist at IBM. "It is great to see analytics play such a critical part towards the conservation of Wildlife."