Dr. Lowman’s latest Nature’s Secrets column in newsobserver.com:
Cutting-edge technology helps save rhinos in India
The North Carolina Museum of Natural History’s new Nature Research Center, opening spring 2012 in Raleigh, will employ cutting-edge technologies to convey scientific discoveries to students, policy-makers and citizens.
Using remote cameras in distant field sites such as forest canopies, the NRC will share discoveries around the planet with audiences and classrooms throughout North Carolina and beyond. These technologies educate people via new programs about how science works. They are already providing solutions to conservation challenges.
In remote northeastern India, intel sleuths have been deployed to eradicate rhino poaching. Kaziranga National Park is in Assam province, not far from Bangladesh; it is home to more than two-thirds of the world’s one-horned rhinos. During the past decade alone, 66 rhinos were killed by poachers. At that rate, the world’s remaining 2,850 one-horned rhinos (of which India is home to 2,390) will disappear by 2050.