(gentle music)
Sky Alibhai: I mean we're experiencing biodiversity losses today
that have never happened in our history,
and monitoring to see exactly
how this change is taking place
is absolutely critical.
Zoe Jewell: You know, one of the key metrics
that we need in conservation
is animal numbers and distribution.
And, at the moment, there are really no other ways
to get that data reliably and cheaply
without either disturbing animals
or having some other negative impact.
But we felt there must be a way
that was better for everybody,
better for the animals, better for the people.
And that was where we started
really taking footprints much more seriously.
Sky: So rather than tagging these animals,
we should be looking on the ground.
That basically was a seeding of Wild Track.
(gentle music)
Zoe: I'm Zoe Jewell.
Sky: And I'm Sky Alibhai.
Zoe: And we're the founders of Wild Track,
which is a nonprofit
for monitoring endangered species.
So we're here at Series International Field Station
in southwest Portugal,
and we are holding a workshop which is designed to
bring together members of the wild track specialist group
and other people who are interested
in non-invasive technologies.
Sky: Wild Track grew out
of our work in Zimbabwe monitoring endangered species.
And we decided to develop a non-invasive technique
simply because the invasive techniques were having
negative impact on animals in terms of fertility.
FIT stands for footprint identification technology.
And the idea is that we take images of footprints.
We then extract the features.
We develop algorithms to identify either it is
sub-species, species, sex, age, class, or individual.
And it's absolutely vital that you have this information,
accurate information, to develop a conservation strategy.
Frederick Kistner: We're now driving towards the Amoreira Estuary
which is a local river system that is quite intact
and has a healthy otter population.
And the main agenda is identify species,
predict sex, count animals in a non-invasive way
combining very old knowledge
like tracking with state-of-the-art, computer science
and artificial intelligence.
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Sky: Okay, well we are going down
to the river's edge and the idea is to try
and see if we can find some otter prints.
So a fairly well used area by the Eurasian otter.
Zoe: The more footprints we're able to pick up
obviously the richer our database
the stronger the database.
And the more data we have,
the better the algorithms that we're training.
So I think, you know, one of the great points
about this technology is that anybody could contribute data.
Recreational hikers to kids in school, local communities,
indigenous communities, who are in close proximity
to the animals.
Pretty much anybody who's out there
who has occasion to look at the ground.
Sky: In the old days, many many years ago,
when we caught an animal,
we would clip its toes
to identify it when we re-trap it next time.
Because then you were left
with an injury to the animal which would stay forever.
I look back on that with utter disgust
because you know, this is utterly unnecessary.
You know, you can come up with a simple technique,
like the one we are using now,
and the amount of information that we get is phenomenal.
(gentle music)
Zoe: So how do the images look from today, Jonathan?
Jonathan D"Souza: Pretty good actually.
So I ran them all through the AI system
and you can see these four here,
of the four of them, three are correctly classified.
Zoe: Yeah, I mean it looks like it's done a good job.
I can see it's picked up at least
three sets of otter prints and a partial human print.
Despite that confusion
it's definitely figuring out what's otter.
Sky: We feel very strongly about the need
for the technologies that we are trying to develop
and we feel very very committed towards that goal.
We started in this simply because we were fascinated
by this work, by the potential of working ways
in which we could help save air endangered species.
And that's basically what drives us.
- Until now, conservation has really been
very much the preserve of professional conservationists.
But we see that everybody has a role to play
in this kind of innovation.
I mean, it is innovation for everybody.
So the more people we can engage in our mission
and working towards that goal, the better it'll be.
(gentle music)