Goldstuck on Gadgets: When wildlife meets Wi-Fi

It started with a rhino. Or more precisely, 45 of them.

That was the grim annual toll of poaching in South Africa’s Sabi Sands game reserve. Rangers were outmanned, outgunned, and overwhelmed. 

Then came the network.

Cameras, sensors, and servers took their place alongside rifles and radios. Within a year, the number of rhinos killed dropped by 96%.

“We went from 45 rhinos killed a year to a 96% reduction,” says Sophie Maxwell, executive director of the Connected Conservation Foundation (CCF). “We were not just putting in technology to stop poaching. We were building a digital shield around these parks. 

“We’ve been working for nearly a decade to make the natural world visible with technology. When people can see what’s happening in real time, they’re much more empowered to protect it.”

We are chatting in a media lounge at the Cisco Live 2025 conference in San Diego, a few hours after she’d wrapped up a standing-room-only panel. The audience had come for AI and hybrid work. They left talking about rhino.

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Maxwell calls herself a conservation technologist. It’s a term she helped invent for her job: to build tech systems that protect wildlife and ecosystems. Her challenge: do it with a team of six, mostly part-time, stretched across continents and time zones. 

“We’re a tiny non-profit,” she says. “But we’ve had a huge impact, thanks to partnerships with organisations like Cisco.”

The CCF was the brainchild of Bruce “Doc” Watson, co-founder of South African IT giant Dimension Data, which is now part of Japan’s NTT DATA. He met Maxwell when she was leading the Zoological Society of London’s Innovation Lab for Conservation, and he persuaded her to start the Foundation with him. 

Their first mission brought him back to South Africa, along with Maxwell, in 2015.

Engineers from Cisco and Dimension Data met with rangers at Sabi Sands to figure out how to stop the rhinoceros slaughter. 

“They were looking for solutions how to monitor the movement of people crossing reserves and get an early warning of incursions. We put in a ‘reserve area network’ to get real-time data back from anywhere else in the reserve. We had cameras looking down fence lines for security purposes, with thermal imaging, so you can detect poaching, incursions and intruders. We put in sensors on vehicles and rangers on foot. We looked at access control, who’s coming in and out, license plate recognition, biometrics.

“It had a massive impact.”

They started with a basic but critical approach: mapping every gate, fence, road, camera, and sensor location on a detailed digital schematic. Cisco switches provided network infrastructure across remote ranger posts and control rooms. Servers were installed to process camera feeds locally, in an early use of edge computing. 

Surveillance included thermal cameras capable of detecting movement in darkness, motion detectors to sense physical disturbances, and high-gain wireless antennas to relay data to command centres kilometres away.

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“And we tested and learned. We worked with the teams to trial what worked in the field,”

The “reserve area network” comprisie vehicles, motion sensors, thermal cameras, and rangers on foot. These include passive infrared sensors that detect heat and motion, and thermal imaging cameras that work in low light and at night. The goal was real-time visibility across thousands of hectares of terrain. Cameras fed into a server, powered by Cisco technology and protected in a modified storeroom. A control room dashboard gave rangers a digital map of everything that moved.

“It gave them the eyes and ears of 20 extra rangers,” says Maxwell. “Right now, they’ve had 600 days poaching-free, which is huge for South Africa. It really was a blueprint to then scale.

“After Sabi Sands, we moved to deploy Cisco kit in more protected areas in Kenya and piloting in a place called Northern Rangelands Trust, which is made up of community-led conservancies, as well as a private reserve. We created a unified network that tied all of them together to deploy their collaborative resources to create a bigger space for nature that was secure and protected. 

“The anti-poaching use case been phenomenal in in Kenya as well. They’ve had zero poaching. Their rhino population has risen by 6% since 2017 and this is due to boots on the ground, and incredible conservation management. But when you couple that conservation management with the multiplier that is technology, you can increase your ability to survey, monitor, and get that real time information that improves your operations.”

The foundation scaled operations to parks in Zambia and Namibia. The model evolved, tailored for each landscape. In one park, they installed remote connectivity in mountainous terrain using long-range wireless relays. In another, they adapted thermal sensors for swampy wetlands. 

Cisco calls this Connected Conservation. It falls under its Resilient Ecosystems initiative, which aims to combine networking and sensing technologies with community empowerment. On the ground, that can mean solar-powered cameras, Wi-Fi relays mounted on trees, and ruggedised backup servers tucked into ranger posts. Online, it means edge computing – where data is processed close to where it is collected – and predictive analytics that alert rangers before threats reach the gates.

Maxwell ticks off the technologies in use:  “It’s an ecosystem of tools which include LoRaWAN gateways – low-power, wide-area network devices – Meraki routers, a beefy Cisco server that sits in a central operations room. All the data comes back from these remote areas into the operations room in real time, so a small ranger team can see across these huge landscapes that can take an hour to fly from one side to the other. 

“It gives them the eyes and ears of 20 rangers.”

The Foundation has now sponsored 35 protected areas across Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, and Zambia, and helped equip more than 200 protected areas. 

“The best part is that communities are now getting hands on their data and being able to be stewards of their natural resources. In Namibia, we have been able to couple elephant collar data, showing where elephants are moving, with satellite imagery provided by the Airbus Foundation, and look at what’s motivating their movements. 

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“We share those maps with the communities, and look with those communities at how best to plan. For example, don’t put a field there because it’s 100-year-old migration route for elephants. These are strategies that are being put in play in wildlife corridors so everybody can coexist.”

Now, AI is entering the mix, says Maxwell.

“If you look at something in a satellite image, AI can see it better than you, and machines don’t get tired. These images are massive, so if you’re scanning them with your human eye, you get tired and you can’t pick it out, but an AI will quickly tell you there’s five elephants and six watering holes in this particular region, and it will give you that insight in hours, rather than take months to work through that image.”

In Tanzania, the foundation is looking at ways to use predictive analytics to assess seasonal migration risks. In Indonesia, ocean sensors are helping track coral bleaching events linked to temperature spikes and salinity shifts.

Every project feeds into a larger goal: an open-source, global library of conservation tech patterns.

Maxwell has a clear vision of the future: “We need to move from isolated pilot projects to connected, scalable solutions. That’s when real impact happens.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI”.