How AI is reshaping wildlife conservation — for better or worse

1 week ago 3

Over the wetlands of Senegal, researcher Alexandre Delplanque pilots a drone to number waterbirds: pelicans, flamingos, and terns. He flies the drone, but AI analyzes the images to number individuals successful a flock, speeding up investigation by thousands of hours per survey, helium estimates. And clip is of the essence.

Since 1970, wildlife populations person plummeted by over seventy percent. The satellite is successful the throes of a biodiversity situation and, according to immoderate researchers, undergoing its sixth wide extinction. The satellite has antecedently endured 5 wide extinction events, with the past ushering successful the extremity of the Cretaceous period: the clip of the infamous asteroid interaction that unleashed a atomic wintertime and killed the dinosaurs. That was sixty-six cardinal years ago.

To rescue taxon from the brink of extinction, archetypal you person to cognize what you have, and however galore â which is often easier said than done, particularly successful fields with a batch to count. Scientists estimation little than 20 percent of insect species connected Earth person been identified. After AI reviewed conscionable a weekâs worthy of camera trap footage successful Panama, researchers accidental they found implicit 300 species antecedently chartless to science.