National Geographic: AI and Wildlife Research

Numerous wildlife species are in rapid decline. New software, photography, remote-sensing and other technologies like Wildbook assist biologists to document the decline, allowing calculation of individual species counts, locations and population assessments in a few days rather than months. Wildbook is free and open source. “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,” reports Anne Casselman for National Geographic. “Thanks to advances in computing power and machine learning, computers now have the ability to learn on their own using banks of data.” Wildbook has data sets on 20 species including jaguars and zebras. The program also monitors uploads on YouTube for tourist videos, especially useful for migratory species. Researchers relied on such data to shift the whale shark’s status from vulnerable to endangered. Also monitored are YouTube posts of green sea turtles, hawksbill sea turtles, giant manta rays, humpback whales, and giraffes. Documenting species decline is only a first step. Societies must also protect habitats, tighten regulations and reduce reliance on carbon fuels to slow climate change. – YaleGlobal