Low-Cost Conservation Technology

低成本保护技术

• 批准号: 2243851
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2243851
• 关键词: Low; Cost; Conservation; Technology

We are currently witnessing an ongoing mass extinction. This Anthropocene extinction is mainly caused by human activities that either directly decimate populations (e.g. over fishing and over hunting) or destroy their habitats (e.g. deforestation and pollution). Recently, human-induced climate change has additionally sped up habitat destruction, which is leading to an even greater loss of biodiversity. We hope to address this problem by providing better technology to conservation biologists. This should speed up and improve their investigations which will allow for more effective policy decisions.Our goal is to foster open development of conservation technology. We expect that this will lead to faster progress and lower end-product costs. To do so, we will be making use of low-volume manufacturing, low-power microcontrollers and cloud processing. As a first step, we want to apply these ideas to the development of a GPS receiver for wildlife tracking. This GPS receiver will use a snapshot method, which means that it only records milliseconds of data at regular intervals. This leads to very low power consumption, which allows for smaller batteries, which in turn means less obtrusive tracking devices. Apart from the technical challenge of building the software and hardware, there is also the problem of making the solution scalable so that it can be accessible to researchers around the world. Some work has already been done on both the algorithms and the electronics for this approach. However, there currently exists no complete open-source solution stack and, more importantly, no affordable end-product. This is what conservation biologists will need to do large-scale GPS tracking.This project relates to the following EPSRC's research areas: sensors and instrumentation, digital signal processing.

我们正在目睹一场持续的物种大灭绝。这次人类世的灭绝主要是由人类活动造成的，这些活动要么直接导致种群大量减少（例如过度捕捞和过度狩猎），要么破坏它们的栖息地（例如森林砍伐和污染）。最近，人类引起的气候变化也加速了栖息地的破坏，这导致了生物多样性的更大损失。我们希望通过为保护生物学家提供更好的技术来解决这个问题。这将加快和改进他们的调查，从而作出更有效的政策决定。我们的目标是促进环保技术的开放发展。我们期望这将导致更快的进展和更低的最终产品成本。为此，我们将利用小批量制造、低功耗微控制器和云处理技术。作为第一步，我们希望将这些想法应用于开发用于野生动物追踪的GPS接收器。这款GPS接收器将采用快照方式，这意味着它每隔一段时间只记录几毫秒的数据。这导致了非常低的功耗，从而允许更小的电池，这反过来意味着更少的引人注目的跟踪设备。除了构建软件和硬件的技术挑战之外，还有一个问题是如何使解决方案可扩展，以便世界各地的研究人员都能使用它。对于这种方法，已经在算法和电子方面做了一些工作。然而，目前还没有完整的开源解决方案堆栈，更重要的是，没有负担得起的最终产品。这就是保护生物学家需要做的大规模GPS追踪。该项目涉及EPSRC的以下研究领域：传感器和仪器仪表、数字信号处理。