Digital Surveillance of Animals and Nature Recovery

Abstract

Digital surveillance technologies (DSTs) are widely applied in nature recovery for their potential to generate novel data on species and ecosystems through digital tracking, automation (for example from hazardous locations), and from newly-recruited citizen scientists. However their use raises a number of wider questions relevant to nature recovery. This paper is an interdisciplinary review of published literature about the potentialities and implications of digital surveillance for nature recovery. DSTs have the potential to contribute to the collection of novel data useful in nature recovery, and allow rapid and efficient capture, management and analysis of data, potentially increasing the speed and reducing the cost of acquiring scientific knowledge. New scientific data may helpfully direct conservation action (e.g. in spatially explicit policy on migration corridors), but there can be problems of bias and distraction. However, digitalisation also shapes human understandings of non-human nature in complex ways, and contributes to the rise of virtual digital natures. The use of DSTs has implications for the future role of human workers, and a role in commoditising nature and extending the grip of technology corporations. The deployment of DSTs also has implications for i) human rights (for example around protected area); ii) for its part in the environmental impacts of digitalisation (for example mineral and energy consumption and e-waste), and iii) for the welfare of tracked animals. The paper concludes that DSTs can make important scientific contributions through the volume and diversity of data and automated management. However, several issues need close attention from users: the potential of digital technologies to shape conservation action, public understandings and commoditisation of nature, and the importance of human rights, animal rights and the environmental impacts of digitalisation. Ethical frameworks, transparency about methods (especially in published papers) and discussion across the nature recovery community are important if the benefits of DSTs are to be realised without associated costs.