Alibaba Cloud, the cloud-computing arm of Alibaba Group, and the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife of the Republic of Kenya have agreed to explore a collaboration to deploy Alibaba Cloud’s technology to support the Kenya Wildlife Protection Project. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities; the project will work to protect the park’s endangered elephants, rhinoceroses and lions.
The first project under the collaboration in discussion will take place inside the Tsavo East and West National Parks, one of Kenya’s oldest and largest protected area with over 13,500 square kilometers, Alibaba said in a statement on Wednesday.
Animal tracking sensors, infra-red trap cameras, smart weather stations, ranger devices and wide-area drones are among the technologies that will be considered to be installed to collect real-time data of the movements and general health of the animals.
In addition, Alibaba and the Kenyan government will explore ways to combine GSM telecommunications network with government-licensed satellites to build the infrastructure, says Alibaba.
This latest initiative follows the visit of Jack Ma to Africa earlier in 2018.
[Image courtesy: Kenya Wildlife Service]