Could adorable tiny tech backpacks save the honeybees?

Scientists are working with houndsmen and houndswomen to track mountain lions in Montana to understand their behavior and to better estimate their population. By forming this partnership and using GPS collars, the team is learning about these animals’ habitat use and where they rest, hunt, and feed. Houndsmen and houndswomen have been crucial in the success of cougar conservation in the state.

Identifying the metagenomic sequencing for new outbreaks of viruses can help to better assess how the virus is spreading, which in turn helps health officials figure out how to slow down the contagion. In the midst of a coronavirus outbreak, a tool that was first used to during the SARS outbreak is now being used to track Covid-19 in under-resourced places such as Cambodia.

As conservationists around the world grapple with saving endangered species, many have turned to the tech sector. Initiatives like The Zooniverse, a citizen science platform for people-powered research, are helping expand over 90 different projects. Even more, scientists have started directly collaborating with technologists to develop products, like weather-resistant cameras for capturing penguins in Antarctica, specially for their work.

The research group, Beneath the Waves, is cultivating cross-sector collaborations with nonprofits, scientists, and individual philanthropists in order to better study the movements and patterns of sharks in the Bahamas. What has typically been a challenging task has been made possible through the use of acoustic tags, which can provide researchers insight into ocean ecosystems and thus conservation. Such initiatives are part of a larger trend of bringing together private donors, nonprofits, and ocean scientists to bolster marine science and conservation efforts.

Scientists, volunteers, and rangers are working around the clock to save the endangered kakapo, a native New Zealand bird. With only 147 of these charismatic birds left in the world, they’re taking a multi-pronged, highly technological approach. Efforts include smart transmitters that track every bird and when they’re mating, artificial inseminations, and hatching fertile eggs in captivity while mothers sit on 3D-printed smart eggs.

Leafhoppers may sound like a harmless term to the untrained ear, but vineyard owners will quickly disagree. These insects have a history of invading and devastating vineyards across the U.S. and Europe. Entomologists may have uncovered a solution however, via studying how the leafhoppers mate. By replicating their vibrational mating calls, so to speak, they are able to hinder the species ability to mate, thus slowing down their reproduction rates.

The healthcare world is highly innovative right now as it tries to make medicine more personalized and harnesses engineering. Hitachi is trying to aggregate data in order to prevent disease and help the healthcare system function better.

Tree mapping helps researchers understand deforestation and climate change, however the technologies used often miss trees that aren’t clustered. Researchers, in collaboration with NASA, used high-resolution satellite images, previously only available to commercial entities, to find a surprisingly large number of trees in the Sahara Desert. Using AI deep learning and one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at the University of Illinois, they identified more than 1.8 billion trees, manually marking nearly 90,000 so the computer could “learn” which shapes and shadows indicated the presence of trees.

As the Mexican wolf population neared extinction, the Arizona Game & Fish Department and the Endangered Wolf Center have been placing pups born in captivity in wild dens. This effort, known as cross-fostering, has been successful in not only increasing the number of wolves in the Southwest, but also improving the survival skills of cross-fostered wolves. While the Mexican wolf population hasn’t completely rebounded, more people are understanding the importance that the species has on the ecosystem.

Arizona’s Game & Fish Department is taking a proactive approach to chronic wasting disease (CWD), a neurodegenerative disease found in deer, elk, and moose. The department works with hunters during hunting season to test dead deer for the disease, which has yet to spread to Arizona. It has also banned deer farms and the transportation of whole deer carcasses into Arizona from other states, citing that it’s easier to keep CWD out than control it once it’s inside state lines.