Illegal poisoning by disgruntled farmers aiming to kill jackals that damage crops and livestock is a major threat to wildlife. Poisoned baits are put in carcasses leading to large-scale poisoning events that damage the entire ecosystem.

To aid in early detection we innovated an alert system which does automatic analysis in real-time of vultures’ location, altitude, body temperature and speed from their GPS-tags. It then does poisoning-likelihood determination whenever the GPS data show behavior consistent with a vulture descending on a carcass. It then does geo-referencing in poisoning-prone zones and then sends automated Telegram alerts only to relevant regional ranger with exact location. All this in a few seconds, enabling rapid on-the-ground response, preventing potential poisonings.

To the best of our knowledge, this the only real-time automatic alert system for finding carcasses based on tagged scavengers operating successfully in the field.