AI + Conservation | Combatting Extinction

AI for Conservation: AI and Humans Combatting Extinction Together

A case study about the harnessing of citizen science and multiple AI methods in wildlife population studies and management. Tanya Berger-Wolff , a cofounder of  Wildbook , will explain how AI methods can be used to turn massive collections of images into high resolution information database, enabling scientific inquiry, conservation, and citizen science. She will also  demonstrate how AI methods are used to collect images from online social media, detect various species of animals and even identify individuals.

Computation, and more specifically and more recently AI, have fundamentally changed the way we live our lives and what we know about the world within and around us.  However, while today we know more than ever about human activity we are flying blind when it comes to understanding the natural world.” says Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Officer and the Director of Microsoft’s AI for Earth initiative Dr. Lucas Joppa. 

BACKGROUND

Recent breakthroughs in data collection technology, such as remote sensing technologies, genome sequencing, autonomous vehicles, and massive automated image and audio recording can provide data about the natural world that are orders of magnitude richer than any previously collected. Yet, the methods for leveraging these data for conservation are lacking. I will show several examples of AI for conservation across the globe and applications.

All of this came together in a deployed system, Wildbook, a project of tech for conservation non-profit Wild Me. We have built Wildbooks for over 20 species of animals, including whales ( flukebook.org),  sharks ( whaleshark.org), giraffes ( giraffespotter.org), and working on elephants. In January 2016, Wildbook enabled the first ever full species (the endangered Grevy's zebra) census using photographs taken by ordinary citizens in Kenya.The resulting numbers are now the official species census used by IUCN Red List and we repeated the effort in 2018, becoming the first certified census from an outside organization accepted by the Kenyan government. Wildbook is becoming the data foundation for wildlife science, conservation, and policy. Read more:   https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/11/artificial-intelligence-counts-wild-animals/