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."
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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." ‘Gentle giants’ urgently need conservation management
Lucy Hodge-Sellers, Geographical"A shark’s pattern is photographed and run through software on the Wildbook for Whale Sharks platform (www.whaleshark.org), a system that has been adapted from NASA software used to identify star constellations." How Conservationists Are Using AI And Big Data To Aid Wildlife
Joseph Winters, OPB"In tandem with citizen science, Wildbook is able to condense years of human work — like photographing thousands of animals and identifying each by hand — into a matter of weeks." H2O.ai Partners with Wildbook to Help Save Elephants with Artificial Intelligence
PR Newswire""Wildbook is using deep learning to save elephants. We are excited to partner with Tanya and Wildbook to bring best-in-class AI to conserve threatened species. AI has the potential to uplift us and make us better humans," said Sri Ambati, CEO and founder at H2O.ai." Computer Vision and Intelligent Agents for Wildlife Conservation with Jason Holmberg
Sam Charrington, TWiML & AI"Jason and I explore the evolution of these projects’ use of computer vision and deep learning, the unique characteristics of the models they’re building, and how they’re ultimately enabling a new kind of citizen science." Astronomy Tool Helps ID Sharks
Annie Sneed, Scientific American"All told, the Wildbook database now has over 5,000 citizen-science contributors, around 30,000 whale shark encounters covering 54 countries, and more than 6,000 individual whale sharks identified. In the latest study using that data, researchers report that the number of known sites where whale sharks gather has risen from 13 to 20." New 'Facebook' for animals could help protect endangered wildlife
Bonnie Burton, c-net"This deep-learning approach enables Wildbook to find the same exact animal in different images, which can then help researchers use even more accurate data about an animal's health, eating habits, hunting patterns, population size and possibly poacher activity." The world’s animals are getting their very own Facebook
Jackie Snow, Fast Company"Give machine learning algorithms enough data and it could uncover previously unknown insights about what makes animals thrive or die. These discoveries will supercharge conservation efforts and benefit populations across the world." Combating extinction one photo at a time
Laura Reed, ScienceNode"The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species now uses Wildbook data on the Grevy’s zebra as its official numbers." |
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