Stay Ahead of Poachers: Illegal Wildlife Poaching Prediction and Patrol Planning Under Uncertainty with Field Test Evaluations
Illegal wildlife poaching threatens ecosystems and drives endangered species
toward extinction. However, efforts for wildlife protection are constrained by
the limited resources of law enforcement agencies. To help combat poaching, the
Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS) is a machine learning
pipeline that has been developed as a data-driven approach to identify areas at
high risk of poaching throughout protected areas and compute optimal patrol
routes. In this paper, we take an end-to-end approach to the data-to-deployment
pipeline for anti-poaching. In doing so, we address challenges including
extreme class imbalance (up to 1:200), bias, and uncertainty in wildlife
poaching data to enhance PAWS, and we apply our methodology to three national
parks with diverse characteristics. (i) We use Gaussian processes to quantify
predictive uncertainty, which we exploit to improve robustness of our
prescribed patrols and increase detection of snares by an average of 30%. We
evaluate our approach on real-world historical poaching data from Murchison
Falls and Queen Elizabeth National Parks in Uganda and, for the first time,
Srepok Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia. (ii) We present the results of
large-scale field tests conducted in Murchison Falls and Srepok Wildlife
Sanctuary which confirm that the predictive power of PAWS extends promisingly
to multiple parks. This paper is part of an effort to expand PAWS to 800 parks
around the world through integration with SMART conservation software.
Authors
Lily Xu, Shahrzad Gholami, Sara Mc Carthy, Bistra Dilkina, Andrew Plumptre, Milind Tambe, Rohit Singh, Mustapha Nsubuga, Joshua Mabonga, Margaret Driciru, Fred Wanyama, Aggrey Rwetsiba, Tom Okello, Eric Enyel