How artificial intelligence is changing wildlife research
Anne Casselman, National Geographic"Enter Wildbook, 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 Giraffespotter database, and presto: a robust population assessment emerges."

How many elephants are there?
Pooja M., Kathleen G., Vulcan Blog"With our project, “Modernizing Wildlife Surveys with Machine Learning” (MWS), we're working with Wild Me, a non-profit based in Portland, Oregon and colleagues in East Africa to develop a platform specifically trained on aerial imagery, the kind that is used to generate these population estimates. If all goes well, we'll be able to release the platform, open source, to allow for other organizations and entities to use it, or even add to it, by training it with their data - it could be a system that can derive population estimates for elephants and eventually other large game, like giraffe, in African savannas to polar bears in Arctic tundra."