We know of neat features like facial recognition on our phones or software that make images from sentences, but did you know that these types of programs are also used in scientific research? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing many fields, and wildlife conservation is no exception. AI is becoming an increasingly helpful tool for scientists to overcome some challenges that wildlife professionals face today, such as:
- Poaching. AI identifies your face to gain you access to your phone, but it also can help game wardens identify poachers and deny them access to protected areas. To counteract illegal hunting and fishing, conservationists are using networks of thermal cameras with AI software to identify heat signals of unwanted visitors. With a quick alert to the ranger, AI can help keep poaching at bay.
- Migration troubles. AI can recognize barriers from aerial photography that are harmful to migrating mammals. With positive identifications of interfering fences and roads, conservationists can work towards eliminating obstacles that stop animal populations in their tracks and alter natural patterns of movement.
- Counting and Identification. AI is used to identify plagiarism in a college paper, but it can also be used to identify wildlife species and their abundance. Trail cameras take many images of animals walking by, but sorting and identifying species and numbers of animals from those images takes time. With the help of AI, these tasks can be fully automated and provide conservationists more rapid and accurate records to perform tasks such as estimating population sizes and species diversity.
Over the last decade, positive results from using AI have researchers excited about its potential. Moving forward, professionals continue with advancements toward managing even larger sets of data from trail cameras and potentially chatbots that specialize in answering conservation questions from the public.