Google’s Street View arrives in Kenya to raise awareness about current plight

The project aims to tell the stories of the elephant families in the park.

In February 2015, a auto from Google Street View drove around the park in order to alleviate any fears about the tool being used as an advantage by poachers.

The initiative, launched along with the charity Save the Elephants, needs to advertise wildlife conservation.

The technology giant has released new Street View imagery from Kenya that includes the Samburu National Reserve, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy and the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

But this time there were no demands to blur out faces -the main residents of the 165 square kilometre (65 square mile) reserve are 900 elephants.

“We hope that by bringing Avenue View to Samburu, we are going to encourage folks all over the world to achieve a deeper appreciation for elephants”, the AFP information company quotes Google Kenya’s Farzana Khubchandani as saying.

The Kenya Tourist board also announced that this is the first national park in the country to allow virtual access inside the reserve. Among the wildlife seen at the reserve are elephants, zebras and leopards.

The Samburu county governor, Moses Lenolkulal, also attended the ceremonial launch.

Two of the primary households of elephants captured by Road View are the Harwoods and the Spice household who’ve been recognized by the form of their tusks.

According to head of field operations of the Save the Elephants, David Daballen, he can already recognize more than 600 elephants in the park, writing about it on a Google blog post.

“I hope this glimpse into life in Samburu has inspired you to learn more about elephants” plight and how you can help.

The safari is just one of the many exclusive virtual tours Google offers from views from the top of Mount Fuji, the Liwa Desert, and the Great Barrier Reef.

David Daballen, of Save the Elephants, said that upwards of 100,000 elephants had been poached in Africa from 2010 to 2012 but that the number of elephants in places like Samburu are slowly on the rise again. With ivory raking in thousands of dollars a kilo in Asia, conservationists have warned that African elephants could be extinct in the wild within a generation.