Artificial Intelligence Helps Save Endangered Species

The World Tide of Technological InnovationReporter Liu Xia from our newspaperIn a recent report, the UK's Nature website pointed out that an increasing number of scientists are using artificial intelligence in the field of biodiversity conservation. They analyze a large amount of data, monitor ecosystems, identify trends over time, address the challenge of biodiversity loss, and save endangered species

The World Tide of Technological Innovation

Reporter Liu Xia from our newspaper

In a recent report, the UK's Nature website pointed out that an increasing number of scientists are using artificial intelligence in the field of biodiversity conservation. They analyze a large amount of data, monitor ecosystems, identify trends over time, address the challenge of biodiversity loss, and save endangered species.

Artificial intelligence takes on heavy responsibilities

Nowadays, the rate of species disappearance is tens of thousands of times that of millions of years ago, with up to one million species on the brink of extinction. In view of this, the United Nations set a goal in 2020: by 2030, at least 30% of the Earth's land, freshwater, and oceans will be protected or preserved in some form. So far, only about 15% of the world's land and 7% of the ocean have been protected to some extent.

Nicholas Meay, the founder of the international non-profit organization "Future Society", stated that although artificial intelligence is currently "not perfect", it may accelerate important discoveries and require the participation of artificial intelligence experts in designing models, as well as collecting, labeling, quality checking, and interpreting data.

The UK non-profit organization ConservationAI is using artificial intelligence technology for various ecological projects. Experts from the organization say that without artificial intelligence, humans may never be able to achieve the United Nations' goal of protecting endangered species.

Identification of species through "sound scene" analysis

The research by the team of ecologist Jorge Miller from the University of Werzburg in Germany has demonstrated that artificial intelligence tools can identify animal species from recordings, thereby helping to quantify the biodiversity of tropical forests.

The researchers also input their recordings into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which can recognize the sounds of birds. The results showed that CNN was able to identify 75 out of the 183 bird species identified by experts, but the dataset of this model is limited and only includes 77 possible bird species that may occur in the region.

This study suggests that artificial intelligence can use sound to more comprehensively identify species in tropical regions, and what is needed now is for humans to collect more data.

Real time monitoring of biodiversity

Researchers from the Conservation AI organization have developed models that can search for lenses and images captured by drones or infrared cameras to identify wildlife (including critically endangered species) and track their activities.

They have established a free online platform that uses its model to automatically analyze images, videos, or audio files, including data from real-time camera lenses and other sensors. When a species of interest is discovered, the model can notify users via email.

So far, Conservation AI has processed over 12.5 million images and detected the appearance of over 4 million animals from 68 species, including endangered pangolins in Uganda, gorillas in Gabon, and gorillas in Malaysia.

The platform can process tens of thousands of images per hour, while humans can only process up to a few thousand. The speed of artificial intelligence processing data allows natural resource conservationists to quickly take action to protect vulnerable species from threats such as poaching and fires.

Simulate the impact of human activities

In addition to real-time monitoring of biodiversity, artificial intelligence can also be used to simulate the impact of human activities on ecosystems and reconstruct historical changes. For example, researchers have used artificial intelligence to discover how century long environmental degradation in freshwater ecosystems leads to the loss of biodiversity.

Although there is sufficient evidence to suggest that human activities have led to the loss of biodiversity in rivers and lakes, scientists know very little about which environmental factors have the greatest impact. Louisa Orsini, who studies evolutionary biological systems at the University of Birmingham in the UK, pointed out that long-term data is crucial for linking changes in biodiversity with environmental changes and identifying achievable conservation goals.

The Orsini team utilized artificial intelligence to develop a model that links biodiversity with historical environmental changes. In a study published in eLife earlier this year, the team obtained genetic material left by plants, animals, and bacteria in lake sediments over the past century. They aged the sediment layers and extracted environmental DNA for sequencing. Then, using artificial intelligence, they combined this data with climate information from meteorological stations, direct measurements, and chemical pollution data from national surveys, To determine the correlation between data.

The results showed that the use of insecticides and fungicides, combined with extreme temperature events and precipitation, could explain 90% of the biodiversity loss in the lake.

Researchers say the main benefit of using artificial intelligence is that it is not driven by assumptions or data. Artificial intelligence can 'learn' from past data and predict future trends in biodiversity with higher accuracy than before.

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