Technology Advancement and Integration in the Context of Wildlife Conservation

World over, the enhanced human activities and all round disturbances have caused dramatic decline of natural ecosystems, wildlife and their habitats. These declines have eventually resulted into reduced goods and services from those natural ecosystems, unsustainable livelihoods and vulnerability of local communities as well as of natural ecosystems. Various governments and non‐governmental organizations have thus, initiated diverse programs to arrest unprecedented decline and wherever possible successfully restored and rehabilitated wild animal species. However, much needs to be done as a large number of wild animal species are facing extinction and have attained either status of rare, endangered and threatened (RET) species or have become smaller, isolated populations. Emergence of technological solutions in the recent decades and timely integration of technology into wildlife research, monitoring and conservation efforts have definitely countered such threats and yielded positive results. Technological innovations have immensely addressed various conservation needs and facilitated better insight and effective management of wildlife resources. Nevertheless, recent technology advancement and its integration with wildlife sector have been partially successful in reducing the risk to wild animals but to a great extent the advancement and integration process has been hindered by prevailing multiple, complex constraints in terms of their feasibility. Likely future technology solutions based on appropriate application of five human senses instead of just two most common human senses (seeing and hearing) are undoubtedly expected to contribute pertinent information for sound decision making and management and thus, would be capable of addressing emerging challenges in the context of wildlife conservation. At the moment, the role of wildlife conservationists in the technology based solutions for conservation has not been taken into account appropriately, and they are inadequately equipped to handle the growing complexity and emerging challenges for preventing increasing wildlife crimes and enhanced human‐wildlife conflict. Based on logical facts presented in this chapter, it is established that in order to ensure effective conservation in future it would be desirable to consider conservationists as central in the overall conservation process. Additionally, there is an urgent need of sharing mental models between the stakeholders, specifically between the conservationists and technologists.