Title
CAPTURE: A New Predictive Anti-Poaching Tool for Wildlife Protection.
Abstract
Wildlife poaching presents a serious extinction threat to many animal species. Agencies (\"defenders\") focused on protecting such animals need tools that help analyze, model and predict poacher activities, so they can more effectively combat such poaching; such tools could also assist in planning effective defender patrols, building on the previous security games research. To that end, we have built a new predictive anti-poaching tool, CAPTURE (Comprehensive Anti-Poaching tool with Temporal and observation Uncertainty REasoning). CAPTURE provides four main contributions. First, CAPTURE's modeling of poachers provides significant advances over previous models from behavioral game theory and conservation biology. This accounts for:(i) the defender's imperfect detection of poaching signs; (ii) complex temporal dependencies in the poacher's behaviors; (iii) lack of knowledge of numbers of poachers. Second, we provide two new heuristics: parameter separation and target abstraction to reduce the computational complexity in learning the poacher models. Third, we present a new game-theoretic algorithm for computing the defender's optimal patrolling given the complex poacher model. Finally, we present detailed models and analysis of real-world poaching data collected over 12 years in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda to evaluate our new model's prediction accuracy. This paper thus presents the largest dataset of real-world defender-adversary interactions analyzed in the security games literature. CAPTURE will be tested in Uganda in early 2016.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.5555/2936924.2937037
AAMAS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Security Game,Wildlife Protection,Temporal Behavorial Model
Poaching,Conservation biology,Computer security,Computer science,Patrolling,Wildlife,Behavioral game theory,Heuristics,Poacher
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-4239-1
11
0.66
References 
Authors
16
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Thanh Hong Nguyen116015.64
Arunesh Sinha215021.67
Shahrzad Gholami3336.47
Andrew J. Plumptre4445.15
Lucas Joppa5176.23
Milind Tambe66008522.25
Margaret Driciru7445.15
Fred Wanyama8445.15
Aggrey Rwetsiba9445.15
Rob Critchlow10121.36
Colin M. Beale11242.66