WildTrack AI is part of our non-invasive tool kit for monitoring endangered species,
such as cheetah and otter and rhino,
we have more than 30 projects around the world with
different endangered species.
One of the biggest challenges in wildlife conservation, is knowing
where these species are and how many individuals there are,
and that data that we collect really
underpins so many important conservation decisions.
So we've started using WildTrack AI, actually in Namibia, to monitor black rhino.
We've been working with the Namibian government
for a long time to monitor rhino
and now this year for the first time we've been able to
bring the power of AI to help us collect and
process much more data than we could before.
And so, we're actually now able to get an idea of where the rhino are going,
and on more of a real-time basis, using
the AI analytics in the cloud
The most exciting part of it I guess, is that it's
all done with footprints. Most traditional AI is using
sort of either pictures of whole animals or humans
or objects but this is using a very cryptic image,
the footprint, so it's really kind of a bit of a breakthrough in AI technology.
Yeah you don't easily see a cheetah in the wild,
but you're more likely to find a footprint
and that will give me information on, you know,
which cheetah have I got here? Have I got it in my database already?
Is it related to other cheetahs?
Which subspecies does it belong to?
What sex is it? What age class does it belong to?
So ideally, it will give me all this kind
of information and it will help us monitor the cheetah population in a certain area.
A footprint is actually something quite difficult. A footprint is a negative of a
foot and our basic hypothesis is that every foot is unique,
however when you look at a footprint
there's a lot of variants coming in, coming from the substrate,
coming from the moisture content,
coming from the gait of the animal (and when
you work with different animals, like I do,
who likes to walk in zigzags, there's even more
variants that is involved in that regard)
and it it takes a long time to pick those things up.
What I see as a big benefit of AI, is that this sort of ancient knowledge can
first of all, be saved and transferred, but also be
maybe learned in a new way. Maybe the computer can pick up things that..
and especially like western
trackers are not able anymore, there's just very
few of them left to get this information out.
It's super cool that we've got an app that people
can actually use to help us collect data.
One of the limitations in conservation biology
up until this point has always been that, you know,
it's kind of the preserve of scientists - they
collect the data, they do their clever stuff
and nobody else is really involved, but now with
everybody having access, almost everybody has
access to a smartphone now, it's actually possible
for people to go and collect that data themselves
and participate in the whole process,
which vastly increases the amount of data we can get.
AI is kind of democratising the whole process and I think that's exciting for people.
Hopefully one day we can actually, rather than go
out and look for footprints ourselves,
send out a drone to find the footprints. Because I could
walk for three days and not find one footprint,
because I can only see this small path I'm on, but I might just be
a few meters away from footprints and miss them.
Now a drone is likely to scan a large area
and see it. So ideally, the combination of drone
and AI will just automate the whole process.
It's exciting times being sort of at a frontier of development because,
environment is complex, it's really
complex and it takes years and years and years of
observation skills, it takes a human lifetime
to understand just your local area and then
transferring this on a wider scale, it takes more
than a scientist's lifetime for that and since the
species are declining at such a high rate AI can
sort of hopefully help us to make things better.
We have to understand that AI is not really intelligent,
it's very fast and it can do things that we can
think of as intelligence, but we need to bring our
human ethical kind of layer to bear on what's
doable, what's not doable, what should be done
and we also kind of need to engage with it on an emotional basis, because it's not
capable of making decisions in the terms of a bigger framework.
As the famous biologist E.O. Wilson said, the biggest challenge for
humanity is that we have Palaeolithic emotions,
we have very ancient kind of emotional skills,
we have medieval institutions,
but we have this God-like technology, so we have to kind of bring
our emotions in our institutions up to be able to
deal with this technology and make it as effective
as it can be. In other words, work in partnership with it,
but not think that it's going to be able to replace us,
because I don't think it ever will.