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JORGE AHUMADA: If you walk into a tropical forest,
you essentially miss 90% of the animals that are there.
They hear things and smell things way before any of us
can.
They're aware of us much more than we are of them.
With camera traps and other passive sensors,
we now have technologies that collect
information, no matter what.
You can put them in a very large area
and then they will snap a picture of an animal going by.
And the amount of information that you can get from them
is incredible.
THOMAS LOVEJOY: The report that came out from the Biodiversity
Convention's scientific body was the first official UN report
on the state of biological diversity of the planet.
And of course, it's not surprising
that it is very alarming.
There have been five times in the history of life on Earth
when there have been mass extinctions.
The premise of that UN report is that we
are on the very verge of a sixth extinction.
Some of the things going on right
now are exactly the preludes that
will lead to such a calamitous loss of biological diversity,
maybe 10% to 20% of all life on Earth.
And it's time for us to wake up and do something about it.
JORGE AHUMADA: When threats like deforestation
are accelerating and evolving quickly,
we just don't have enough time to wait for data to come in.
JOSÉ MANUEL OCHOA: One place that we were setting camera
traps, we left the cameras for one month and we get almost
150,000 pictures.
And this is like the bottleneck that we have.
We improved the system to collect the data,
but we are quite slow in processing and analyzing
this information.
JORGE AHUMADA: The second barrier
that we identify with camera trap data is
that the data is siloed.
And it's very difficult to have a big picture
of what all this data is telling you
if it's all in different places.
Wildlife Insights is a response to these barriers.
TANYA BIRCH: Wildlife Insights is
a cloud-based, AI-enabled platform
that allows many different organizations to upload,
store, manage, and share their data
and derive meaningful insights from that data.
The hope is that it's going to drastically speed
the process of getting the data from in the field on the camera
to up in the Google Cloud and open for analysis and mapping.
JORGE AHUMADA: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
TANYA BIRCH: The first priority for the AI models
is being able to distinguish if there is an animal in an image
or if there's just a blank background
with no animal in it.
The second task is to do species classification
and allow a researcher to filter through millions and millions
of images and say, show me all the greater bamboo
lemurs or whatever species of their interest.
JORGE AHUMADA: If we have good data about what's
happening to wildlife, this will provide
a guide for policymakers.
It's basically illuminating the path.
THOMAS LOVEJOY: I think we're just
at the beginning of being able to understand how
we can use this very powerful tool, the ability
to have our finger on the pulse of these wild places
and then being able to translate that very quickly into advances
in conservation for a more sustainable future.
JORGE AHUMADA: That's where we want to go.
If we build Wildlife Insights and it
becomes a huge collection of camera trap data
that never gets used for anything,
we have utterly failed.
Change is what we're after.
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