Community-informed identification and analysis of wildlife poaching hotspots for targeted IoT deployment

Introduction Targeted monitoring of large natural areas through the Internet of Things remains a significant challenge for wildlife conservation. While IoT systems can detect wildlife poaching, the scale of conservation areas makes blanket coverage infeasible. Therefore, identifying key hotspots for IoT deployment is essential. Existing geospatial and clustering methods assist in hotspot identification, but no prior work provided a complete cold-start pipeline from community memory to a community-derived hotspot map when no prior incident records exist. Methods This study presents a five-stage geospatial data pipeline for the 2,000-acre, ecologically diverse campus of the University of Hyderabad India. The stages are: (1) campus digitization using OpenStreetMap and QGIS; (2) feature extraction from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Copernicus, WorldPop, and PROBA-V, yielding a spatial dataset of 13,000 points with 40 features each; (3) computation of distance vectors to all digitized natural and infrastructural elements; (4) community labeling (11–12 respondents) of K-Means clusters using a ternary scheme; and (5) label propagation and hotspot map generation. Results The descriptive analysis conducted in this study showed that community-identified poaching areas exhibit ecologically coherent spatial patterns compared to areas labeled as non-poaching and ML classification confirmed the labels are spatially learnable, with KNN model reaching a weighted F1 of 0.96. Discussion The pipeline extends prior art into a substantially more challenging context: no historical records, responses from non-expert community members, and an explicit uncertainty representation. The resulting hotspot map helped the development and deployment of a fog-based, energy-efficient IoT monitoring system, which is also discussed in the paper. The pipeline is applicable to any conservation area where official records are absent, and community knowledge is the only available ground-truth resource.