PAWS: GameTheory Based Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security

This chapter introduces Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS)(Yang, Ford, Tambe, & Lemieux, 2014) as a joint effort by computer scientists, conservation researchers, and conservation practitioners from two nongovernmental organizations—Panthera, and Rimba. PAWS is a game theory-based application to assist conservation agency officials in planning wildlife ranger patrols to prevent wildlife crime. Reducing risks to people and wildlife from wildlife crime ideally includes the combined effort of practitioners worldwide and researchers in many different disciplines; PAWS demonstrates the positive impact that research in computational game theory, an important topic within the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), can have in assisting wildlife conservation agencies to prevent poaching. In recent deployment efforts, patrol planners mentioned that the routes generated by PAWS came close to an actual planner’s routes, a promising sign that PAWS can suggest feasible routes and help reduce the significant burden of patrol planning.Poaching directly threatens some species’ survival. For example, tigers, along with many other endangered species, are in danger of extinction because of poaching risks (Global Tiger Initiative Secretariat, 2013; Montesh, 2013). The global population of tigers has dropped over 95% since the 1900s, resulting in 3 out of 9 species going extinct (Global Tiger Initiative Secretariat, 2013) in part to poaching. In 2015, South African rhino poaching reached a rate of approximately 1 death every 8 hours (Save the Rhino International, 2015). Species extinction can destroy ecosystems and weaken the communities and …