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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