Thermal Imaging Tech Helps Protect Endangered Wildlife

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[Narrator] Look closely.

This is what a wildlife poacher on the run looks like.

This is the view through a thermal infrared camera

being used by rangers at a conservation park in Kenya.

Wildlife poaching is a huge problem.

Just last year, 1,200 of the 25,000 rhinos

left in South Africa were killed for their horns.

Rhino and elephant populations

have been particularly hard-hit over the last decade.

Now, World Wildlife Fund has teamed up with

the thermal imaging company FLIR

to watch over endangered animals 24 hours a day.

FLIR's thermal imaging cameras

pick up the heat signature of anything that moves

in front of their lenses, animal or human.

WWF, working with a grant from Google,

has set up a test of thermal imaging tech

here at Kenya's Masai Mara Conservancy,

and another at an undisclosed park

that's home to rhinos.

Some cameras are mounted on poles

while others are set up on vehicles

or carried as handheld scopes.

The technology can see as far as a mile.

The thermal imaging, says WWF,

gives rangers the literal ability to see in the dark

and that's the upper hand in this critical game

of hide and seek.

The fixed position cameras feed back to a central command

where an artificial intelligence algorithm

trained to detect human movement

keeps a digital eye out for poachers

and when it sees them, rangers can swoop in

and catch the perpetrators.

Already the tech has been used to stop 26 poachers.

Now the WWF is putting thermal imaging on drones,

giving wildlife protectors eyes in the night skies.

So you can run poachers, but you can't hide.

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