{"id":11756,"date":"2024-10-12T18:28:33","date_gmt":"2024-10-12T18:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.starsskytravel.com\/?page_id=11756"},"modified":"2024-10-12T18:32:25","modified_gmt":"2024-10-12T18:32:25","slug":"how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-wildlife-research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.starsskytravel.com\/ar\/how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-wildlife-research\/","title":{"rendered":"How artificial intelligence is changing wildlife research"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How artificial intelligence is changing wildlife research<\/span><\/h1>\n

From analyzing animal photos to combing through YouTube, new software is harnessing data never before accessible to scientists.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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San Diego Zoo\u2019s Jenna Stacy-Dawes knows all too well the urgency of her research. Reticulated giraffes across the regions in northern Kenya that she studies have declined up to 70 percent in the past thirty years. Across Africa, giraffe<\/a>\u00a0numbers have shrunk by 40 percent in the same period, down to less than 100,000 individuals. Biologists are rushing to assess their numbers, movements, and preferred habitat to ensure protection of those areas. But the traditional way of counting giraffes using aerial surveys costs time and money, both of which are in short supply in the giraffe world.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Enter\u00a0Wildbook<\/a>, a software program developed by Portland-based conservation tech nonprofit Wild Me, which automatically identifies individual animals by their unique coat patterns or other hallmark features, such as fluke or ear outlines. With the help of Wildbook and the nonprofit Giraffe Conservation Foundation, Stacy-Dawes, a research coordinator at the zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, and her colleagues are able to blitz a giraffe population with photos over two days, upload the images and location data to their\u00a0GiraffeSpotter<\/a>\u00a0database, and presto: a robust population assessment emerges. So far they\u2019ve used Wildbook to assess giraffe numbers across three wildlife conservancies in northern Kenya.<\/p>\n

“Before a population assessment wasn’t something you could do in a weekend. It’s incredible,” Stacy-Dawes says. “It’s been really helpful in allowing us to work faster and understand the population better than we ever really could have before.” (Learn more:\u00a0How to save the world\u2019s tallest animal<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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By year\u2019s end GiraffeSpotter will be publicly accessible so that everybody from park rangers to tourists on safari can upload their giraffe photos and location information to the online database. “We can increase our study efforts 10-fold by having tourists and citizen scientists be able to contribute to our research. It provides us with a huge data set that wouldn’t have been accessible before,” she says.<\/p>\n

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A bot developed as part of Wildbook combs through YouTube to automatically identify individual whale sharks based on their unique constellation of spots.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Brian J. Skerry, Nat Geo Image Collection<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Welcome to the world of artificial intelligence in service of conservation, where some of hardest working additions to a research team aren’t the lead scientists or interns but tireless computers. Just as artificial intelligence (AI) powers Amazon’s Alexa, Gmail’s spam filter, and Facebook’s new friends suggestions, it\u2019s now being used to help out the animal world. AI is well on the road to completing tasks typically done manually by researchers, from identifying individual animals from photos for population studies to categorizing the many millions of camera trap photos gathered by field scientists. Thanks to advances in computing power and machine learning, computers now have the ability to learn on their own using banks of data.<\/p>\n

“There’s a perfect storm of AI and camera trap technology in terms of understanding animals from images,” says Robert Long, a conservation biologist at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, who has been collaborating with Microsoft to develop AI tools to help monitor rare carnivores in the Pacific Northwest using camera traps. “I think it’s literally a revolution underway in terms of auto-identification of animals, whether it’s from still cameras or video.\u201d<\/p>\n

Binge-watching YouTube<\/h2>\n

In addition to Microsoft\u2019s AI for Earth, which Long is working with and\u00a0National Geographic Society helps fund,<\/a>\u00a0there\u2019s Google\u2019s Wildlife Insights too. Both are collaborating with researchers to roll out the automation of camera trap photo analysis. Microsoft\u2019s program, a five-year, $50 million project that provides researchers access to AI tools to solve environmental challenges, is also working with Wildbook to lower the cost of new Wildbook databases. The goal is to move from start-up costs as high as tens of thousands of dollars down to an annual operating cost of $1,000.<\/p>\n

Already Wildbook runs databases for 20 species, ranging from jaguars to zebras, but there are thousands of other species that computers could be trained to identify. Each Wildbook is typically used collaboratively by multiple organizations and research labs, with individual researchers owning their own data within the Wildbook database.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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