The era of the Information Technology revolution has endeavored mankind with enormous technological comforts. Apart from human health care, cloud computing integrated with other technologies can be exploited for the welfare of endangered wildlife animals that are currently on the verge of facing extinction in the near future. International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has declared a huge number of wildlife species into red list falling into 'critically endangered', 'endangered' and 'vulnerable' species because of pathogenic diseases, poaching, habitat degradation, and climate change. The aim of the chapter is to propose a cloud computing based wildlife health care model to preserve, sustain and protect the global wildlife heritage and wildlife conservation by identifying and providing treatment to diseased animals, monitoring their health conditions periodically and protecting against poaching. The proposed health care model makes use of various wearable sensors implanted on and within the body of an animal. The sensors perform data gathering about different body-related parameters to be transmitted to a cloud system for analysis and reporting a required timely action. When a cloud system senses emergency with respect to the health-related or threat-related incident, the information is immediately signaled to wildlife physician and wildlife ranger respectively to act accordingly.
TopIntroduction
The 18th century emerged as the age of the industrial revolution and renaissance. The 19th century was dominated by classical physics, mathematics and astronomy. The first half of the 20th century was the age of displaying military might and power, armed race which showed the world two great wars ever fought. The second half of the 20th century especially the last two decades became the era of computers and electronics on a massive scale. The 21 century appeared to be the age of information and telecommunication technology especially the second decade of information technology enabled the integration of different technologies to merge to form smart computing. The integration of different computing, communication, sensing and internet-based technologies paved the way for developing smart and intelligent systems much enough automatic and robotic to relieve human intervention to a great extent. Some of the technologies embedded in smart computing are networked devices, Internet of things (IoT), big data analytics and processing, web services, cloud computing and high generation cellular networks. Smart technologies are expected to make a lot of benefits on socio-economic and environmental aspects in traditional and non-traditional fields [1] [2][3].
Wildlife forms an essential part of the biosphere and biodiversity that regulates various ecosystems and environmental factors like food chain, food web, ecological balance, pollution breakdown, climate stability, water bodies’ protection and soil formation. Apart from this, the wildlife plays an important role in social, economical, religious, cultural and educational activities like medicinal values, natural aesthetics, fun and entertainment, culture and heritage, recreation and tourism development, food security, wildlife research and development, economic development, job creation, sustainability, agriculture and farming. Figure 1 shows Panthera Tigris locally known as a tiger from the cat family in a wildlife sanctuary.
Figure 1. Photo by Pawan Kotiyal [7]
Figure 2. Snake Venom used for medicinal properties [7]
Figure 2 shows the extraction of python venom which is used for the treatment of various diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s syndrome and Parkinson’s syndrome.
Figure 3. Wildlife adds aesthetics to nature picture by wildlife Orrisa [8]
Figure 3 depicts how wildlife makes our planet colorful and adds aesthetics to nature.
Unfortunately, most of the wildlife animal species are getting endangered or face extinction at the hands of humans because of the destruction of natural habitats for land development, smuggling, poaching and hunting for leather, skin, fur, jewelry, ornaments and meat that are the contributing factors towards wildlife animal extinction. Hence, it becomes of utmost importance to preserve and conserve wildlife animals for the welfare of ecology and biodiversity. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list release 2012, out of total 63,837 species assessed the report revealed that 19,817 are threatened with extinction, 3,947 were specified as “critically endangered”, 5,766 were described as “endangered” and more than 10,000 species were listed as “vulnerable” [9][10][11][12]. According to the world wildlife fund report, the global wildlife population declined by 52% between 1970 and 2014 [6].
Figure 4. Some of the prominent critically endangered wildlife animals