The planet has lost nearly three-quarters of its wildlife in fifty years — and a group of scientists meeting in Kumasi this week believes technology may be the last realistic tool left to stop the slide from becoming a freefall.
Ghana sits inside one of the most ecologically pressured regions on earth. Africa has recorded a 76% average decline in wildlife populations since 1970, the second-steepest regional drop globally according to the Living Planet Report 2024. More than one million species now face extinction worldwide, with amphibians and marine mammals among the most exposed. Habitat destruction, climate stress, and overexploitation are driving the losses simultaneously, and conventional conservation methods — slow, labour-intensive, and underfunded — are struggling to keep pace. The question gathering urgency in scientific circles is not just how to document the collapse, but how to build systems that can actually interrupt it.
That question brought researchers from Ghana, Brazil, and the United Kingdom together in Kumasi from March 24 to 27, 2026, for the Biodiversity Monitoring Tools Workshop, organised under the CONNECT framework — Capacity Building and Observation Network for Nature and Climate in Tropical Ecosystems. The event is a joint venture involving the Forestry Commission of Ghana, CSIR-FORIG, the University of Ghana, and the University of Bristol. It targets postgraduate students, early-career researchers, and conservation professionals, introducing them to three technologies reshaping the field: AI-powered biodiversity monitoring, Species Distribution Models that predict where wildlife can survive under changing conditions, and Environmental DNA analysis, which detects species presence through genetic traces left in water and soil without disturbing the animals themselves.
University of Bristol Senior Research Fellow Fillipe Machado França framed the workshop’s ambition plainly. “We want to fill the science and policy gap. Sometimes we are generating knowledge, but we need to make sure that the knowledge being created here is being adopted and translated into real actions in the real world,” he said. CSIR-FORIG Deputy Director Dr. Mrs. Lucy Mensah echoed that urgency while adding a direct call to government. “Partnering with this group from the University of Bristol in the UK and our Brazilian colleagues would build the capacity of a new generation of scientists in Ghana, and we think that is going to help us achieve our mandate inscribed by the Government of Ghana, which includes the conservation of biodiversity and forest resources,” she said. She then pushed further: “Government should come in to support the training of young scientists in this regard” — a pointed reminder that technology adoption requires investment, not just enthusiasm.
Participants arrived with specific research needs and left the workshop better equipped to meet them. Jannatu Fridaus, a researcher from the University of Ghana’s Department of Marine and Fisheries Sciences, said the combination of AI tools, distribution models, and eDNA techniques would feed directly into her work. The practical orientation of the training — skills applicable on Monday morning, not just in academic papers — is what separates this kind of initiative from conference-room ambition.
Ghana cannot conserve what it cannot monitor, and it cannot monitor effectively without the scientists and tools this week’s workshop was designed to produce.
Source: MyJoyOnline
