Tanya BergerWolf How your nature photos can help protect wild animals TED

in 2014 i met sudam

the last male white northern white rhino

in the world

just four years later

sudan died

leaving two

both female northern white rhinos alive

the species are effectively extinct

and they’re not the only ones

we’re losing biodiversity at an

unprecedented scale

we’re in the middle of what is termed

the sixth mass extinction a biodiversity

crisis

and we don’t even have the scientific

and technological solution to keep up

knowing what we’re losing and how fast

the international unit for conservation

of nature

red list

is the official international

organization that keeps track of the

biodiversity of the world

and of the 130 000 species that they

track out of the millions that are out

there

majority

have their conservation status

as data deficient

or

their population trend as unknown

and these are iconic species like killer

whales

and polar bears

we don’t know how well they’re doing we

can’t make policy decisions

we can’t put the right resources to

protect them

how many african elephants are there how

fast are they lost to poaching how far

do the whales go and how many juvenile

turtles survive to adulthood we don’t

know

and these data are critical to

conservation decisions

so how do we get those data

there are not enough scientists to track

every animal everywhere all over the

world and not enough

collars and satellite tags to track them

besides to put a satellite tag or a

collar on an animal you have to actually

capture them

tranquilize them

have a vet

present to monitor the vital signs of

the animal and even if everything goes

right

the collar can get snagged on a branch

or the satellite tag can get infected so

this can be dangerous to the animals

today

images are the most abundant readily

available source of information about

anything from what you had for lunch

to what animals you saw in your backyard

or in a safari tour

coming from scientists field assistants

camera traps as well as drones and

tourists going on safaris and whale

watching tours there are millions of

images out there

if you could only take those millions of

images

and extract the information about

wildlife

well

artificial intelligence to the rescue

we designed algorithms and created a

platform

wildbook that uses modern artificial

intelligence machine learning

and computer vision to take these

millions of images

find the ones that contain animals

find where the animals are in those

pictures including that baby elephant

hiding behind its mom

and figure out not only species

but down to individual animal

recognizing zippy the zebra and joe the

giraffe and terry the turtle and willy

the whale

using the unique markings on an animal

body like a fingerprint

a body print if you wish

the stripes spots wrinkles notches as

well as the shape of a whale’s fluke or

the dorsal fin of a dolphin these are

unique as every animal is

and with information on when and where

the image was taken

we can now use

pictures

instead of colors and tags to track

animals

count them and even figure out their

social network who is whose animal’s

friend

this is an example page from a wild book

for whales and dolphins fluke book

and this is pinchy

the most sighted animal in that wild but

pinchy is a celebrity she’s a ham she

likes getting her picture taken

she has more than 600 sightings around

dominica she lives there she hangs out

there

and flipbook the wild book for wells and

dolphins

contains

more than a million images

of

almost 46

000

identified individuals

providing the basis for science and

conservation

we even

developed an artificial intelligence

agent

who scours social media publicly posted

images and

videos and finds the ones that contain

animals sends them off to this machine

learning back engine

for identification and adding to the

appropriate page of the right wild book

and then posting back in the comments of

the social media saying hey at two

minutes 46 seconds we found this whale

shark in your video here’s everything we

know about it and people respond

wow this is amazing how can i help

that

how can i help

we engage people

right where they are using turning their

vacation videos into data for science

and conservation with the help of

artificial intelligence

the wild book for whale sharks contains

data now for more than twelve thousand

individual whale sharks

from photographs brought in by

almost 9 000 citizen scientists 200 plus

conservation and science projects and

one very intelligent

agent

from social media

that together that is now the foundation

for the iucn red list entry

for the species

providing not only data for the global

population size

but determining its conservation status

and changing it from vulnerable to

endangered

and the population trend from stable to

decreasing not because the species are

doing any worse

but because we now know better

we can make better decisions we can

create better policy we can put the

right resources to

to support it

we have wild books for 53 species

from marine to terrestrial spanning the

entire globe and growing

the technology in wild bug

was also used for the first ever full

senses

of the entire species the endangered

gravy zebra

using photographs from ordinary people

just

taking pictures for two days

for the first time in january 2016

hundreds of people were driving around

kenya the country containing 95 of this

endangered species

from rangers

and school kids to tourists with

telephoto cameras they took more than 40

000 images and the machine learning

technology of wild book identified all

the animals providing the most accurate

count of the species so much so that

kenya wildlife service said this how

we’re going to track the species from

now on and do this every two years

with the event known as the great gravis

rally

and so we repeated it in 2018

with more than thousand people and also

in 2020

and that data

became the basis for the iucn red list

entry for the gravy zebra

as well as for the conservation policy

the endangered species management

for kenya wildlife service

artificial intelligence

democratizes science

it connects people

bringing together the pixels of

individual cameras into the global view

of biodiversity

ai

helps

create conservation policy

science and engage people at large scale

and high resolution

and it takes the incredible team

of wild me the non-profit home of wild

book as well as thousands of people all

over the world

who take pictures

annotate them and make them ready for ai

create technology

and use it for conservation as well as

all the people who work out there in the

field

protecting the biodiversity of the

planet

and i hope you join us

you

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