Raspberry Pi aids conservation work
Fox Hunt
© Lead Image © donatas1205, 123RF.com
As a countermeasure to predators of rare ground-breeding birds, live traps are monitored by a microcontroller and a Raspberry Pi.
In a nature reserve in northern Germany, foxes and martens threaten rare ground-breeding birds. Although the park supervisor catches the predators with live traps, checking the traps is time consuming and expensive in this virtually inaccessible area. Between 40 and 50 traps have to be monitored, which means long and mostly unnecessary inspections.
The use of modern technology would minimize the considerable effort involved in regularly checking the traps by having a microcontroller and Raspberry Pi team up to monitor the traps electronically and send an automatic alarm when one of the traps is triggered. However, the path from this idea to its implementation took longer than originally thought.
One of the challenges was the lack of mobile Internet in the sparsely populated area, although text message services are available. A previous article [1], in which one of us described how to set up a 3G hotspot with a Rasp Pi and a UMTS [2] stick, was the basis for the collaboration on this project.
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