[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.]
By Adam Andrzejewski
Real Clear Policy
Is that a cow or native tule elk?
That’s what 10 undergraduate students in a UC Santa Barbara lab asked for eight months while spotting the wildlife and livestock on satellite images.
It was part of a study that looked at the interactions between the two animals where their ranges met or overlapped in the Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County, California.
Funded with a combined $45,000 from National Science Foundation and the Digital Globe Foundation, the study looked at where the grazing area abutted wildland, with concerns that predation, competition and disease transmission would occur.
The researchers had two large datasets from the park: GPS monitoring data from collared elk and field-based surveys of the elk. But they lacked information on the cows, mainly their movements and habits.
The student researchers found that the elk avoided cow pastures and chose separate foraging sites so there would be fewer potential instances for grazing conflicts.
An unrelated project from a business in Ohio got $225,000 from the National Science Foundation in 2019 to create a “cowculator” which allowed for automated cattle counting and temperature screening from aerial images.
These studies may be for scientific purposes, but they sound an awful lot like bull.
The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.]
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