Environmental sensors, drones, camera traps, molecular genetics, miniaturized GPS devices, robots capable of communicating with animals. In recent years, technological innovations have revolutionized the way we study nature., opening up scenarios unimaginable until recently. And this is just the beginning. Advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and quantum computers will offer increasingly powerful tools to probe every aspect of ecosystems and wildlife.
But knowing is no longer enough. As our cities and our needs grow day by day, the urgency is no longer just to study the environment, but to learn to share itAlong with technology, our hunger for space and resources is growing exponentially, and in an age where relationships with our fellow humans and with all life forms are becoming increasingly tense, the challenge of the future, rather than understanding the world, is figuring out what we will do with these superpowers.
Will we use technology to communicate or to subjugate? To foster coexistence or exploitation? To care or to destroy?
Hello! Welcome back. I'm Tommaso D'Errico and this is Rendez-vous, a podcast produced by I'm not afraid of the wolf dedicated to the intertwining — often invisible and sometimes explosive — between humans and wildlife.
In the first episodes, we saw how coexistence between us and wild animals isn't easy at all. It's not easy for them, forced to live in environments shaped by our presence, and sometimes not even for us. Today we begin a journey that will take us to explore the future, to address a crucial question: understanding whether — and how — what is most modern can help us find a balance with what is most ancient.
To try to answer this question, I started in Abruzzo, the green lung and wild heart of Europe, an open-air laboratory of coexistence for centuries. The ideal place to realize that The more modernity advances, the more the boundaries between our world and the wild one become blurred.And to discover whether technology can really help us coexist with the creatures that live alongside us, even those that scare us the most.
Forests and mountains as far as the eye can see. Bright blue lakes, prairies teeming with life, and medieval villages nestled in the greenery like precious stones. Seen this way, Abruzzo seems like a perfect postcard. A natural paradise where you're more likely to get stuck in a traffic jam of deer than of cars. But beneath the surface, a stormy sea rages. Here, the balance between human and wild is particularly fragile, and the risk of conflict lurks — literally — around every corner.
I discovered firsthand how literal this expression is last spring. A friend and I were hiking a mountain trail in the pouring rain. We were walking with our heads down, careful not to slip, when suddenly, just after a bend, we found ourselves face to face with a pair of bears. They appeared out of nowhere from beyond the wall of water, the female in front and the large male right behind, so close we almost tripped over them. A scene so surreal that it didn't even cross our minds to get nervous or scared.Luckily, the bears also remained calm. They sniffed us for what seemed like an eternity, then turned around and went their own way, occasionally looking back at us until they disappeared into the woods.
A close encounter. Photo by Tommaso D'Errico
Marsican brown bears are tolerant animals and almost never show aggression toward people. But the problem is that in Abruzzo, an encounter like this can happen to anyone, whenever and wherever you least expect it. You don't have to go into the woods to find yourself in front of a beast that can weigh over two hundred kilos., since bears also indulge in excursions outside their habitat. The presence of food sometimes pushes them to loiter near residential areas, creating potentially very risky situations for everyone.
Chicken coops, orchards, stables, and apiaries are the ones who suffer, but often the bears themselves are the ones who lose out. As in the case of Juan Carrito, who became an internet sensation thanks to his antics and was killed by a car on the highway near Castel di Sangro. Or as happened to Amarena, shot dead on the outskirts of San Benedetto dei Marsi while searching for chickens with her cubs.
Falling victim to road accidents or poaching is an all too likely fate for confident bears, but These violent deaths are a tragedy for the entire species.The Marsican brown bear numbers only about sixty, all distributed in a small area of the central Apennines, and the death of a single individual is a step closer to the brink of extinction. And the loss becomes incalculable when the death involves a mother like Amarena, capable of giving birth to four cubs at once.
The possibility of peaceful coexistence with bears and the very future of these animals depends on our ability to keep them away from towns and roads. Not an easy thing to do, as anyone on the front lines protecting these rare creatures knows well.
Amarena the bear with her cubs. Photo by Luigi Filice for Save the Bear
In thirteen years of fighting, the Save the Bear association has understood one fundamental thing: To save the Marsican from extinction, we need to act on multiple fronts.
The first is environmental. As Serena Frau, the association's project manager, explained to me, it's important to make the mountains a safe and welcoming home for bears. This meticulous work encompasses a variety of activities—from restoring abandoned orchards to removing old barbed wire fences, from searching for poisoned bait to securing artificial reservoirs, where too many bears have already drowned.
Another key aspect is that of coexistenceTo mitigate conflicts, the work is moving from the woods to the villages, with the goal of creating "bear-friendly communities" through training sessions with the population and direct prevention interventions, such as the supply and installation of electric fences, chicken coops, bear-proof doors and bins. The goal is not just to inform, but to involve and empower local communities. In other words, Serena summarizes, we ask people to actively participate in the coexistence process and we do everything we can to ensure that people don't wake up in the morning to find a bear in their yard.
These efforts, however, risk being in vain if we fail to curb human mortality, which still represents the main cause of death for Marsican brown bears. Despite everything, too many bears continue to die at the hands of man, especially on the roads, due to the high speed and the lack of infrastructure — such as barriers and underpasses — which should protect both wildlife and motorists.
The latest tragedy is just now breaking news: an accident in which an adult bear lost its life along the state road between Sora and Avezzano on the night of December 21st, while I was preparing to film this episode.
Collisions are a problem that doesn't just concern bears. Quantifying the number of victims is impossible, but what is certain is that In our country, on roads and railways, real massacres of wild life occur every dayA recent study conducted by I'm Not Afraid of the Wolf highlighted that in Italy approximately 60% of wolves die as a result of collisions. And we pay the price too, with dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries every year due to collisions with wild ungulates.
Photo by Simone Formisani for Save the Bear
The rivers of asphalt with which we have flooded natural habitats today represent the most critical point in the relationship between humans and animals. But this is precisely where new technologies can make the difference.This is what Stefano Dell'Osa, a computer engineer and volunteer with Save the Bear, tells me. A couple of years ago, after yet another accident, he "began to find a solution"—as he puts it—to road safety. And, as we'll see, not only that.
Stefano's idea is that artificial intelligence can act as a "facilitator," helping to bridge the gap in personnel, funding, and infrastructure required to address a complex issue like coexistence in urbanized areas.
The project he has been passionately dedicated to in recent years is called WADAS, acronym for Wild Animals Detection and Alert System: an intelligent eye capable of detecting the presence of wild animals and triggering safety measures in real time to protect people and animals.
Basically, WADAS is a software application that uses an artificial intelligence engine to scan images and videos from a camera, identifying the presence of animals and establishing what species they are, even in poor visibility. Upon detecting a danger, the system can send notifications via email, WhatsApp, or Telegram and, if necessary, within a fraction of a second, activate a series of devices on the spot, such as barriers, gates, acoustic and luminous deterrents, or electronic signs that warn drivers of the presence of wildlife on the roadway.
© WADAS Project and PNALM
Stopping road massacres is currently WADAS's main objective, but in the long term the possibilities for using a system of this type, combined with other technological tools, are practically endlessConsider, for example, a "smart feeder" capable of recognizing which domestic species are allowed to gorge themselves and shutting the door on bears and deer, preventing them from becoming accustomed to human food. Or imagine a drone that, at the first sign of alarm, takes flight over the alleys of a town, deploying specific deterrents to scare off the nosy animal of the moment—be it a bear, a wolf, or a wild boar.
Sounds like science fiction to you? Well, it's not. Similar systems are already used in several areas of the world, to address local problems that are similar everywhere.
On the snowy peaks of Pakistan, a system very similar to WADAS has significantly reduced snow leopard attacks on domestic livestock, with immediate benefits for both farmers and the conservation of this endangered apex predator. In the Indian state of West Bengal, cameras capable of detecting the passage of elephants provide real-time warnings to local communities, mitigating a conflict that causes dozens of deaths and extensive damage to crops every year. In Africa, a zebra protection program is testing the ability of artificial intelligence to recognize not only the species, but individual animals, starting with the stripes on their fur. In Japan and the United States, drones equipped with cameras patrol sensitive areas to locate aggressive bears and drive them away from populated areas without anyone getting hurt.
These are just a few examples, which tell of an epochal transition: If the challenge of coexistence has become global, technology is a universal language that we can learn by collaboratingIn Abruzzo, WADAS is being tested thanks to a partnership between Salviamo l'Orso, the University of L'Aquila, the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park, and two major companies, Intel and Reolink, which have provided tools and expertise in the field of processors and video surveillance services.
The results are encouraging, even if Stefano is the first to underline that When technology leaves the laboratories and collides with reality, a thousand problems always emerge.In addition to technical issues—such as the need to protect data or the chronic lack of signal in mountain areas—bureaucratic complications continually arise, from the challenge of making different agencies communicate with each other to regulatory loopholes that seem designed to stifle any innovation.
And then, of course, there's the economic issue. Stefano is proud of one thing: the "brain" of WADAS is low-power, can run on a simple laptop, and doesn't require expensive servers or third-party cloud services. But the problem lies in the "muscles," the mechanical actuators that enable more complex applications, such as smart feeders or display-equipped signs, which are prohibitively expensive for a volunteer-led project.
Stefano, however, is confident. Conflicts have always been a driving force for innovation, and while on the one hand, projects like this require resources and expertise, on the other, they are challenges that are fueled above all by enthusiasmYou have to be a bit of a nerd, he says, and highly motivated. It's passion that makes you bang your head against problems until you find a solution, perhaps with the help of other professionals and enthusiasts. It's with this spirit—another source of pride—that WADAS was born as an open-source project: a free and open source software, open to contributions from other experts and available to anyone who wants to protect natureOn one condition: that it is never used for commercial purposes or, worse, for any type of hunting.
© WADAS Project and PNALM
Returning to the questions we started with, I believe that part of the answer is hidden right here, among the digital bits and the woods of Abruzzo. If used consciously, technology can prove to be a valuable ally in helping us return to healthy relationships with other living beings.It's not about being techno-optimistic at all costs—like Elon Musk, for example—but about realizing that the value of every tool depends on how we choose to use it. We can't prevent tomorrow from being hyper-technological, but we can decide whether this power will serve to distance us ever further from nature or to make the world a more welcoming and safer place for everyone.
We spend a lot of time wondering whether our computers are becoming really intelligent. And perhaps too little to ask ourselves if we are intelligent enough to use them in the right way.One thing is certain. If we can't predict the future, there's something even more powerful we can do: imagine it, and then roll up our sleeves to build it exactly as we imagined it.
Because, as I will never tire of repeating, living with wild animals is not just a technical challenge. It is also and above all a cultural choice.
To stay updated on this story and find out how to support the coexistence projects of Save the Bear and I'm Not Afraid of the Wolf, you can visit the official websites and social media channels of the associations: you will find all the links in the description of this episode.
I also remind you that Rendez-vous was created to be an open and shared place. If you have had encounters or stories that deserve to be shared, write to me at rendez-vous@iononhopauradellupo.it
All that's left for me to do is wish you a happy coexistence in the new year and look forward to seeing you in the next episodes. Among other things, we'll return to discuss futuristic technologies, and in particular a truly fascinating idea that could change the rules of coexistence with wolves and other large carnivores.
That's really all for this episode. We'll meet back here in a month. At our usual rendezvous.
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