Provided as a donation given as part of Google's Global Impact Awards that totaled $23 million, the WWF said it will implement a sophisticated monitoring technology that will help protect tigers, elephants, and rhinoceroses from being attacked and killed by poaching gangs.
The technology will be based on electronic animal tagging and "remote aerial survey units", signal receivers on the ground as well as guidance software for law enforcement to intercept poachers. Remote aerial surveillance apparently refers to the use of drones - a word the WWF and Google reportedly avoid due its military and negative connotation. The devices will be able to report the location of hunters, calculate the best interception path, as well as ground photography.
The WWF said that the grant enables the organization "to test advanced but easily-replicable technologies and create an overarching system to curb poaching. […] Our goal is to create an efficient, effective network that can be adopted globally."
There was no information how many drones the Google donation would allow the WWF to buy.
