Our next guests are Jessica Pfohl and Anne Washington from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Thank you so much for being here and welcome to The Junction. Thank you.

Thank you.

Can you introduce yourselves and what your background is and how it relates to the field of veterinary forensics?

Uh, so I'm Jessica Pfohl and I have a bachelor's degree in criminal justice and a master's in administration of justice, um, and I was an analyst for probably about 10 years before I came to Florida Fish and Wildlife where I am the, um, intel analyst, uh, supervisor.

And my name is Anne Washington. I have a degree, in conservation biology for my bachelor's and biodiversity and conservation biology for my master's. And, my projects were in GIS and doing, spatial data analysis. So that kind of transferred over into FWC, where I am now the GIS technician for their law enforcement department.

What is the purpose of the FWC?

So, Florida Fish and Wildlife, um, it was created to protect him and preserve florida. Um, it's natural, um, habitats, waterways, um, and protect its animals. Um, and we do a lot of enforcement on obviously fishing, captive wildlife, boating, things like that.

Your talk was on geographic information systems, and that is something that is very, can I say, very technological. What is GIS?

So, GIS is geographic information systems, which is basically any sort of program or data analysis that looks at spatial data. So, Crime is a spatial problem. It happens at a place at a time. So to be able to identify trends or to be able to identify hot spots, you want to be able to map out this data and then run statistical analyses on it to be able to better identify those areas.

How does GIS help with animal cruelty investigations?

So we basically use GIS to try to do more hotspots. Um, it's not really used in like, per se, like animal cruelty. Um, but when officers want to know where they should set up a deployment, because they're trying to stop, you know, poaching. Good example is night hunting. Um, so you're not supposed to do that, but that's when a lot of times guys go out to poach. So, um, we do hot spot maps to show them in their area of responsibility where they should be setting up for deployment. Obviously, you don't want your officer spending time deploying to a place over the last five years. It's never had. an incident or a call for service or a warning or a citation written. You want them to go to places where that has, has typically happened. And that's why we do the hotspots to show them that this is where you need to go so that we can try to stop the poaching of, you know, Florida's wildlife.

What kind of data do you use to, to get this information?

So we use, not only, we use calls for service, um, we use, um, We use citations and we use warnings. I don't, some, we could use field intel reports, but they don't really, they're more for intelligence gathering, but that's the data points that we're showing them. This is where all the resource citations, resource warnings, and this is where it's your calls for service. And we do both, we do a map of calls for service, we do a map of, of warnings and, um, citations, and then they can, then we too do them together so you can kind of see whether they're correlating or not.

So, once you collect the data and you kind of know where the problem is happening, what's the next step and what kind of technology can you use to, to find the perpetrators of these crimes?

So, the officers will then go out and do their deployments, um, and then we can also set up, you know, game cams and things like that so we can see if there's traffic coming in and out of that area. We can then use, like, license plate reader systems. Um, facial recognition to try to identify those people. People per se we get a picture of somebody off a trail cam or something like that. Then, you know, we can use facial rec or we can check the cameras to see who may have been coming in and out, um, and then look at, look at the vehicles and, and tags and things like that.

You were talking about using both GIS data and then ecological data. So how do you use both of them in, in what you're doing? Yeah.

So ecological data kind of helps us focus in on areas of activity. So like for instance, you know, you're interested in turtles or our freshwater turtles, which are being poached and sold overseas as a delicacy. Uh, you're probably not going to be finding them in areas where that turtle isn't present. So we kind of use that ecological data to be like, okay, this is where the turtles are occurring. So if we have high populations of them, that's most likely where they're going to get poached. And then we can then overlay that with our hotspot analysis to actually see if that's actually the case. And if not, then we have to figure out, okay, is there a gap in our data? What are we missing here? And then we can, uh, further continue our, um, you know, deployments and rechecking that data to make sure that we are focusing on those areas which are being um, used up basically.

This is a really interesting and great use of technology, and I imagine that there's not a lot of places that are doing this. So if there are some of the listeners that are interested in finding more information, what resources are there?

Well, they can contact one of us. Um, we've helped multiple, uh, wildlife agents across the, uh, country with not only intelligence, but, uh, G. I. S. I know has been in touch with several of the agencies as well. So anytime they need anything, it's kind of hard to find training and things like that specific to wildlife crime for intelligence analysts and G. I. S. Um, so we kind of all just kind of help each other. So they'll, they'll, uh, They can reach out to either Anne or I.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with this, and thank you for what you're doing.

Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for having us.