How your nature photos can help protect wild animals | Tanya Berger-Wolf

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 [Music]