ADMIRAL 20101214 Elephant field researcher

From ImageWeb

Rough notes from meeting with LK from Fritz Vollrath's STE group.

Contents 1 Centres, people and activities 1.1 Available power 1.2 Available data communications 2 Elephant data 3 Wish list 4 Technology options

Centres, people and activities

Nairobi:

• Festus runs GIS team; simple, large maps, 30-100Gb per map
• Poor communications; satellite; satellite+"safaricom" (cellular mobile)
• Tracking system server in colocation facility ("Safaricom"?) with good connection to Canada
• 4 GIS staff, 4 admin

Samburu:

• LK does elephant observations, data collection
• Daily data collection to Excel and Access DB
• Access maps, spreadsheets, text files
• Some records from paper notebooks are transcribed (not scanned)
• Satellite <= 20Kb/sec; data rates variable
• 3-4 individual researchers, in or affiliated with Oxford
• 5 permanent staff, 3 transients

• Local backup to external drives, + "sneakernet" for off-site (twice annually)
• Paper notebooks, with drawings, etc., were lost in 2010 flash floods

Canada:

• Jake Wall runs main database; receives tracking system data (via supplier in Sweden)

Available power

Field station: solar + generator backup; manual change-over

Nairobi: variable; fluctuating voltage; day-long outages.

Available data communications

There are currently no reliable real-time data communications between Samburu and Nairobi. But this is hoped to change with increased "Safaricom" mobile coverage, but available bandwidth is patchy, especially during the daytime, and costs per megabyte.

Elephant data

1200 elephants pass through reserve. About 750 are known to researchers. 20-30 have radio collars.

Wish list

• General server in Nairobi for centralized sharing of data (with access control)
• Communications (in the field) (some mention of "SECOM cable")
• Reliable power
• Spare laptop
• Nairobi server for backup, etc
• Synchronization (as insurance)?

Technology options

(This is all highly speculative)

• Android platform data synchronization; STE group have strong ties with Google.
• N2P style evolution of "dropbox meets bittorrent"?
• Integration of bittorrent + distributed version management