Some residential estates are very big so it can be quite difficult for management to always be aware of what’ s going on because there is so much to keep tabs on.
Live Smart / Innovation
Louis Liebenberg
Smart management
Some residential estates are very big so it can be quite difficult for management to always be aware of what’ s going on because there is so much to keep tabs on.
Even if your estate is not strictly a wildlife estate, it’ s important to know the condition of the veld and the health – or otherwise – of animal communities. The old adage – if you can’ t measure it, you can’ t manage it – is particularly true here. And, surprisingly, there is a fantastic app that you can download for free that will do just that.
Created by two Capetonians and originally designed to enable non-literate trackers to record their findings, CyberTracker is a ground-breaking initiative that has garnered numerous awards for its inventors, including the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, and the Wildlife Society’ s Spatial Ecology and Telemetry Working Group( SETW) Award.
It all started when Louis Liebenberg spent a number of years doing anthropological research in the Kalahari with San, or Bushman, hunter-gatherers. He ended up spending months on end with the hunters, learned to track, and got to know and become friends with the! Xo community from Lone Tree in Botswana. Chatting round the campfire one night, some of the older hunters told him they were worried about the younger generation. They could no longer survive by hunter-gathering and needed to find employment. But that was really difficult,
of course, as they had no marketable skills. The only thing they could do – and they did it really well – was tracking. But, being illiterate, they had no way of turning that skill into a marketable asset.
So, Liebenberg teamed up with Justin Steventon, an IT student at the University of Cape Town. Between them they developed an icon-based, hand-held device that enabled trackers to accurately record their findings. The original CyberTracker was based on the Apple Newton tied in to a GPS so that observations could be recorded while the exact location and time was automatically attached to each piece of data. The data, once downloaded onto a desktop, could be analysed in a number of ways.
The real test of the software, the hardware, and the principle behind the whole thing was a programme of tracking the endangered black rhino in the Karoo National Park near Beaufort West. Most of the data were collected by two trackers employed by the park – Karel Benadie and James Minye. In the past, researchers who had used trackers to gather data had considered them merely field assistants – and had worked on the principle that the trackers had just‘ collected’ data. Liebenberg realised that the data – i. e. the tracks and signs – were lying out there in
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