(speaking in foreign language)
(dramatic music)
(speaking in foreign language)
(dramatic music)
(speaks foreign language)
- Since the demobilization of the scientists,
for the first time they have unprecedented access
to some areas that were very difficult to get to before.
(speaking in foreign language)
- It's a very exciting moment.
We're rediscovering our country.
(ethereal music)
Already Colombia is a mega diverse country
but La Macarena, this particular region,
is a very, very diverse and unique place.
(speaking in foreign language)
- A baby.
- Science is all about discovering something new,
understanding something better.
So a place like this, that is virtually unknown,
is very exciting.
(speaking in foreign language)
(dramatic music)
- [José] The Amazon was the first victim
of the peace process.
It was something that happens quite quickly.
The scientists, many people was warning the government.
You have an increase of deforestation.
This is one of those most common resources of the
post-complex scenario on a global level.
Deforestation is the main trip for biodiversity,
and for us this is a big concern.
We are counting an amount of eight hundred soccer fields
per day.
It means around thirty-two per hour.
(dramatic music)
(crickets chirping)
(bird flapping its wings and chirping)
(Speaking in foreign language)
- [José] Once you clear the forest, you can claim that the
land is yours.
So, you put some cattle there and say,
"Okay, this is my land."
And after that, you have a big land of owners that
are arriving into those areas and they buy this land
and you are getting these colonization processes started
again, because they have to move into a new
colonization frontier.
And that is why it's so difficult to cut this cycle of
deforestation.
(unsettling music)
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Jorge] An umbrella species are species that
if you see them, there's an indication that
this exists and is functional.
So, camera traps are a way to tell us,
"Yes, there they are! We have them. They're still here
with us."
(hammock creaking)
(rooster crowing)
(wood being chopped)
(footsteps in dirt)
- To work here, in a place that is remote
and a little unknown, requires a lot of courage
and a lot of understanding of local culture.
(water boiling)
(speaking in foreign language)
- [José] Angelica works together with Armando
and other people to help her figure out where
to best put the camera traps because they have
this unique knowledge.
(ethereal music)
You have to be mindful of places where the animals use.
And these are very, very subtle signals in the forest
that show that an animal repeatedly uses a little trail
or a little path.
(speaking in foreign language)
(inspiring music)
- [José] The most important part of the mission of
our institution is to provide advice to the
Minister of Environment.
- When threats like deforestation are accelerating and
evolving quickly, we just don't have enough time to
wait for data to come in.
Rather than waiting for things to get really bad, we wanna
get in front of them.
(suspenseful music)
- One place that we were working on, using camera traps,
we left the cameras for one month and we get almost
150,000 pictures.
This is a huge amount of information,
that if you don't have an automatic system to
identify this species that you have, it will take at least
one year to get this process done.
And this is like the bottom night that we have.
We improve the system to collect the data, but we are
quite slow in processing and analyzing this information.
And this is why wildlife insights is so important.
- [Jorge] Wildlife insides is a response to
how difficult it is to get to understand the big picture.
So we built wildlife insights to speed up data processing
of camera trap images.
(Speaking in foreign language)
- [Jorge] If we have good data about what's happening
to wildlife,
this will provide a guide for policy makers.
It's basically illuminating the path.
(Speaking in foreign language)
(dramatic music)
- [José] The environmental issues are happening
quite quickly.
And that is why the government needs to have this
information ready for decision making and this is the key
role of the wildlife insights process.
To get this process as quickly as possible to be able to
take the best decisions in
the shorter periods of time.
- [Jorge] That's where we wanna go.
If we build wildlife insights and becomes a huge
collection of camera trap data, the network gets used
for anything.
We had utterly failed.
Change is what we're after.
(Intense music)
- [Thomas] The natural world is not only beautiful
and wonderful; it is essential,
and the scientific consensus is
that we're facing the probable, but not certain,
extinction of maybe a million species.
Maybe ten to twenty percent of all life on Earth.
So, it's a big wake up call.
(Intense music)
- [Thomas] I have a very, very definite point-of-view about
extinction, and that it's simply wrong to terminate
what is essentially a four billion year line of evolution.
(Intense music continues)
You know, the question is do we wanna live in a lonely
wasteland?
(ethereal music)
The amazon is this quite astounding self-regulating
system, making half of its own rainfall.
I mean, you can actually see it.
You can see the clooms of moisture coming up
after a rainfall.
What's sort of buried in that, is the implication that
too much deforestation will cause that self-regulation
to fall apart, and you'll have a tipping point and a
die back.
(Fire crackling)
You're actually looking at the destruction of some of the
most biologically diverse communities on the planet.
(dramatic music)
We're just at the beginning of being able to understand
how we can use this really very powerful tool,
eventually using machine learning and camera traps.
And that it gives us the ability to have our finger on
the pulse of these wild places, and then being able
to translate that very quickly into advances and
conservation.
We are now on the verge of new mass extinction.
It's time for us to wake up and do something about it.
(Cinematic music)
(Speaking in foreign language)
(Sounds of the amazon)
(Unsettling music)
(Continues speaking in foreign language)