By Sarah LaBrasca | Project Leader
Artisanal fishermen on the island of Busuanga in the Philippines tell how sighting a dugong brings happiness and good luck to their community. Folklore around these legendary mermaids is still entrenched in their local tradition. But dugong are particularly vulnerable to capture in fishing nets and since these gentle mammals cannot stay for long underwater without coming up to breathe, entanglement can very often be fatal.
So local fishermen are delighted to participate in the project run by Smart Earth Network and local NGO Community Centred Conservation (C3) which, thanks to this funding campaign, has not only given them mobile phones which very few could afford, but more essentially has created a specially-developed app on these phones that they can use to record sightings of dugong.
By simply pressing on the app logo, the fishermen take a photo which is sent along with geo-positioning data to a central database, allowing a precise and comprehensive picture of the dugong population to be built up. The app also tracks the fishing boats to identify dugong-free areas of sea, which in turn allows more targeted conservation activities to be put into practice. A database of the numbers, locations and threats to the dugong is being established, the local community is engaged and practices put in place to best assist the protection of this vulnerable dugong population.
“Technology and conservation can unite to open a new era of environmental action” explains Simon Hodgkinson, founder of Smart Earth Network. Also focusing on reducing the accidental but all too frequent by-catch of sea-turtles and dolphins, SEN has already identified a team to find a low-cost producer of devices to attach to artisanal fishing nets that warn off these large and endangered species.
Because you have expressed your interest in this project and your concern for nature conservation, please link up to the SEN website www.smartearthnetwork.com and join (there’s no fee or engagement) and see more updates on both conservation issues and technical ideas to help preserve nature.
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