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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 17, 2018
Conservationists use AI and big data to aid wildlife
Tech is giving
conservation a
makeover
By JOSEPH WINTERS
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Give Jason Holmberg
10,000 zebra photos and he’ll
find the specific individual
zebra you’re looking for, no
problem.
“It could take two min-
utes,” he said.
Holmberg won’t personally
sort through the photos — it’s
his software that will. Holm-
berg is executive director of
the nonprofit Wild Me. The
Portland-based organization
has developed a digital tool
called Wildbook that uses arti-
ficial intelligence and machine
learning to expedite wild-
life identification. In tandem
with citizen science, Wild-
book is able to condense years
of human work — like photo-
graphing thousands of animals
and identifying each by hand
— into a matter of weeks.
In research and in daily life,
AI is rapidly changing the way
things work. With some savvy
software engineering, comput-
ers can learn to carry out com-
plex, tedious tasks — whether
it’s detecting cancer cells,
operating driverless race cars
or analyzing hockey plays.
And as Wildbook shows, AI
is giving conservation a make-
over, too.
“It blows human efforts out
of the water,” Holmberg said.
For example, in 2016
researchers in Kenya orga-
nized a two-day event in
which volunteers drove over
prescribed regions of the
country, taking pictures of all
the zebras they could find.
The team of over 350 scien-
tists, government officials,
park rangers and community
members collected more than
40,000 photos in total.
“It would be impossible
for a research team to take all
those photos, let alone analyze
them,” said professor Chuck
Stewart, head of the computer
science department at New
York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute.
Instead, citizen scientists
were enlisted for data col-
lection and Wildbook’s AI
algorithms helped research-
ers identify every zebra in
just a few weeks. The Ken-
yan government even recog-
nized the results of the study
as the country’s official zebra
census.
For each photo submitted
to the system, Wildbook scans
the image for signs of wild-
life, filtering out background
data like trees and brush. Then
another algorithm steps in
to identify not only the ani-
mal’s species but its individ-
ual identity.
“Rather than just ‘this is
a humpback whale,’ it says
‘this is Willy the humpback
whale,’” Stewart explained.
Wildbook can do this
because many animals have
unique markings that distin-
guish them from other mem-
bers of their species, “like a bar
code,” explained Dan Ruben-
stein, professor of zoology and
program director of environ-
mental studies at Princeton.
For zebras, it’s their stripes.
With whales, it’s the curvature
on the edge of their fins. Soon,
researchers hope to iden-
tify elephants by the shape of
their ears, which flicker before
they charge, or even primates,
which may be identifiable with
facial recognition technology.
Accuracy?
As for the accuracy of these
automated IDs? For some
projects, “it gets it right about
99 percent of the time,” said
Rubenstein, who tests the soft-
ware in his field work on Ken-
yan zebra populations. He also
provides ecology and biol-
ogy guidance to the Wildbook
team.
The population data created
with Wildbook’s help can be
used for much more than a cen-
sus. At Oregon State Universi-
ty’s Marine Mammal Institute,
professor Scott Baker uses the
software to understand hump-
back whale migrations in the
South Pacific. Other research-
ers have used it to learn about
risk mitigation behavior in
giraffes.
But most importantly, Wild-
book is a tool for conservation.
By encouraging citizen par-
ticipation and with the speed
of AI-driven data processing,
Holmberg hopes to quicken
the creation and evaluation of
conservation strategies.
The arrival of tools like
Wildbook comes at time of
growing concern for global
biodiversity. In March, a
United Nations panel released
a collection of reports finding
that plant and animal species
in every part of the world were
under severe threat. By some
estimates, as many as 200 spe-
Simon J. Pierce
A whale shark. Big data and AI allow scientists to rapidly comb through thousands of photos and identify individuals
using the skin patterning behind the gills and any scars they might have.
cies are lost each year. Some
have gone so far as to say that
we are witnessing Earth’s most
devastating extinction event
since the end of the dinosaurs,
65 million years ago.
Researchers are calling for
a collaborative effort to protect
biodiversity.
“From accountants to IT
developers and machine learn-
ing experts, all of these are
desperately needed to ele-
vate wildlife conservation to
the 21st century,” said Wild
Me software engineer Drew
Blount.
This includes citizen scien-
tists, as well. For researchers
and AI software developers,
smartphone cameras represent
data-collection game-chang-
ers. And a platform like Wild-
book can make submitting
data easy and accessible.
Partnerships with tech giants
can offer conservation-minded
nonprofits the resources to
grow beyond their limited
means. The Rainforest Connec-
tion, for example, uses Goo-
gle’s Tensorflow technology to
monitor the Amazon Rainfor-
est, listening in for signs of ille-
gal chainsaw activity.
A similar opportunity mate-
rialized for Wildbook this June
when Microsoft announced it
would back the nonprofit as
‘Informatics
revolution’
In the future, Holmberg
and his colleagues hope that
AI and machine learning
will continue to ease human
researchers from the burden
of tedious tasks. One exam-
ple is the whale shark You-
Tube scanner, which scours
the web for relevant videos of
whale shark sightings.
Every 24 hours the soft-
ware finds videos titled or
tagged “whale shark,” down-
loads them, reads the descrip-
tion, and uses machine
Wild Me learning to identify which
The Portland-based nonprofit Wild Me has developed a individual whale shark (if
tool called Wildbook. It uses artificial intelligence to iden- any) appears in the video. The
tify individuals in a species.
software can even use geolo-
cation information to disre-
part of its AI for Earth pro- way to digest hundreds of gard videos shot in an aquar-
gram. By providing access to thousands of images,” Ruben- ium and ask real YouTubers
more expansive cloud com- stein explained.
for more information by post-
puting and AI resources, the
But Microsoft’s cloud ing a comment.
partnership will help make capabilities will allow data to
It sounds like the stuff of
Wildbook more accessi- be compartmentalized. Instead the future, but the technol-
ble to researchers and citizen of haphazard organization on ogy is already being deployed.
scientists.
isolated computers, data will “It’s what we might call an
informatics revolution,” said
“It’s gonna be huge,” said be stored online.
Rubenstein.
In addition to improving Baker. He and fellow research-
Before AI for Earth, images data management, the Wild Me ers, conservationists, and citi-
submitted to Wildbook had to team also plans to use AI for zen scientists are hopeful that
bounce between imaging soft- Earth’s support to give Wild- by making data more acces-
ware and database software, book a facelift. An improved sible and interpretable, Wild-
from algorithm to algorithm, user interface will keep users book can help solve — or at
as part of the cataloging pro- engaged and eager to continue least mitigate — the biodiver-
cess. “That’s not an efficient submitting photos.
sity crisis.
Group sues to expand orca habitat
Whales are
endangered
By GENE JOHNSON
Associated Press
SEATTLE — An envi-
ronmental group sued Presi-
dent Donald Trump’s admin-
istration Thursday to make
officials move more quickly
to protect the Pacific North-
west’s endangered orcas.
The recent grieving of
one whale for her dead calf
and scientists’ extraordi-
nary attempts to save another
from starvation highlight the
urgency of their plight, the
Tucson, Arizona-based Cen-
ter for Biological Diversity
said as it filed the lawsuit in
U.S. District Court in Seattle.
There are just 75 orcas
remaining in the Pacific North-
west population, the lowest
number in 34 years. They’re
struggling with a dearth of Chi-
nook salmon, their preferred
prey, as well as toxic contam-
ination and vessel noise.
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The lawsuit says the
National Marine Fisheries
Service has failed to act on
the center’s 2014 petition to
expand habitat protections
to the orcas’ foraging and
migration areas off the coasts
of Washington state, Ore-
gon and California — even
though the agency agreed in
2015 that such a move was
necessary.
The center says the protec-
tions would help reduce water
pollution and restrict vessel
traffic that can interfere with
the animals.
“Time is running out
fast for these magnificent,
intelligent orcas,” Cather-
ine Kilduff, an attorney with
the organization, said in an
emailed statement. “It’s heart-
breaking to watch them starv-
ing to death and mourning
their dead calves. Every day
that Trump’s people delay
action is a step toward extinc-
tion for these whales.”
The three orca pods that
make up the so-called south-
ern resident population have
not successfully reproduced
since 2015.
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