For a while now I have been thinking about how something like Ambrosus could help in the fight against poaching as well as just being a very usefull tool for ecological studies.
The initial idea I had was to embed peizoelectric gps trackers into Rhino horns and store the data on a publicly available ledger (There is already research in progress for such devices, see link below). Having this data in a public distributed ledger will go a long way towards making sure corrupt officials can not tamper with it. Rhino horns and ivory are big business and the bad guys have fingers in every pie. This makes it very difficult to follow the trail to the top of such organisations.
The same technology would also be very useul in other areas of ecology. From tracking smaller game like Lion to monitoring plankton, currents, movement of plastics in the ocean etc. The best part is that the data would be safe. With recent events in the USA where public climate data has been pulled offline it makes sense that we start storing this data somewhere safe where it cannot be tampered with.
I see good things coming out of Ambrosus and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes.
http://bigideas.berkeley.edu/winners/piezoelectric-shoe-sole-gps-tracker-uc-berkeley/For Rhino a GPS data on the ledger may need to be encrypted or at least if the animal is known to be alive be stored at quite a wide resolution to avoid data being used for poaching.
