The Bale Mountains National Park is a landscape of extraordinary diversity, from cloud forests to grasslands and alpine moorlands. Home to a vast array of endemic species, it is a critical source of water for over 30 million people living downstream across Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya.
Protecting the Bale Mountains is therefore essential for both people and nature, and bringing the Ops room to life is a vital step in conserving this critical landscape.
The Operations Room is the nerve centre of a protected area. It is where information is centralised, visualised in real-time, analysed and processed, playing a critical role in protected area management. The Ops room supervisor is the link between the rangers on the ground and the support of the logistics and management teams at HQ. The data, collected by rangers, camera traps, GPS collars, bio-acoustic units, and a range of other processes, informs different conservation practices — rangers can be tracked, their reports followed in real time, collared animal movement patterns observed and mapped, etc.
Pictured below is the Ops room supervisor Mukulen. He is monitoring the EarthRanger system while following live updates from InReach devices carried by rangers in the field.
For the first time in Bale, EarthRanger is bringing together all available conservation technologies—patrol tracking, GPS collars, camera traps, and more—into a single, connected system. This gives the team a real-time view of what’s happening across the park. It’s a powerful shift in day-to-day conservation work, helping connect people, places, and tools in a shared effort to protect Bale’s wildlife and landscapes.
This has been possible thanks to a collaborative effort between the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority (EWCA), Frankfurt Zoological Society / Zoologische Gesellschaft Frankfurt (FZS), Chengeta Wildlife, EarthRanger and Off-Grid Consulting. We acknowledge the tireless work of FZS in protecting the Bale Mountains and are grateful to support this.
The Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority has embarked on a project to strengthen and further professionalise its workforce as Ethiopia strives towards meeting global conservation commitments to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Photos: 1) Muluken, the FZS Ops Room Supervisor 2)Learning to collect data in the field 3)The Ethiopian Wolf by Andrew Danckwerts
