Jewell & Sky soft-jump Rhino tracks

Lakhs of black rhinos and white rhinos roamed free and wild all over the African subcontinent once upon a time. Once upon a time, and that was not so long ago.

Even as early at the 70s the numbers of wild black rhinos was as much as 65 000. Poaching has drastically reduced their numbers. Currently rhino numbers have dwindled to just about 3000. Since, the last decade, a husband and wife team, Zoe Jewell and Sky Alibhai have been working very hard to save the rhinos. In 1991, the team founded Rhinowatch.

However, to keep track on rhino numbers with conventional methods like marking hoofprints and counting horns and heads appeared to be decidedly old fashioned and extremely difficult to monitor and execute. Jewell and Sky first tried fitting rhinos with radio collars. Of course, this is an extremely difficult task as the rhinos need to be first knocked out with a tranquilizing gun and each rhino is top heavy at 1750 -3000 lbs.

Now, the couple have started applying a much better, simpler and quicker system to keep track of their precious, dwindling numbers of rhinos. Using global positioning systems they take pictures of left rear rhino footprints, alongside a ruler for scale. It's as simple as that. After this point, a software takes care of the rest. Named NiSAS and developed by Nigel Law of UK the distance between predetermined points on the three-toed rhino footprint is measured. A total of as many as 77 measurements -- 47 lengths and 30 angles -- are taken for each footprint.

Once this task is completed, another software called JMP Statistical Discovery Software does the remaining work. JMP identifies each track and classifies it with the footprints most like them. According to John Sall, executive vice president at SAS and officer in charge of JMP software who has been working very closely with the Rhino watch team estimates that 2001 numbers show that the rhino population is up by 500 as compared to the year before.