Author: Weizhe Chen, Weinan Zhang, Duo Liu, Weiping Li, Xiaojun Shi, and Fei Fang
Wildlife poaching is threatening key species that play important roles in the ecosystem. With historical ranger patrol records, it is possible to provide data-driven predictions of poaching threats and plan patrols to combat poaching. However, the patrollers often patrol in a multimodal way, which combines driving and walking. It is a tedious task for the domain experts to manually plan such a patrol and as a result, the planned patrol routes are often far from optimal. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach for multimodal patrol planning. We first use machine learning models to predict the poaching threats and then use a novel mixed-integer linear programming-based algorithm to plan the patrol route. In a field test focusing on the machine learning prediction result at Jilin Huangnihe National Nature Reserve (HNHR) in December 2019, the rangers found 42 snares, which is significantly higher than the historical record. Our offline experiments show that the resulting multimodal patrol routes can improve the efficiency of patrol and thus they can serve as the basis for future deployment in the field.