Artificial Intelligence to Help Prevent Extinction? | Wildlife.ai: Conservation Charity

Kia ora!
Welcome to "The Change Makers" - a weekly video series presented by Better Ancestors.
In this series our change makers share their stories, their thoughts, their ambitions and their actions to leave the earth a better place - to be better ancestors to future generations.
Our planet is experiencing catastrophic environmental harm and it requires us to think long term, beyond our lifetimes, to evaluate our choices and to take actions to ensure a sustainable and healthy future for all.
The stories of those leading the change, those thinking and acting with long term vision, are inspirational.
Inspired, we can ask ourselves, “what can we do to be Better Ancestors?”
This week, Better Ancestors visits with Wildlife.ai in Taranaki, on the West Coast of Aotearoa / New Zealand. The team at Wildlife.ai, led by Dr. Victor Anton, are bringing advanced technologies to wildlife conservation.
Artificial intelligence and data-driven algorithms developed by Wildlife.ai can be used by biologists to identify animals, both protected species and invasive predators, from thousands of hours of camera trap video recordings. Traditionally, it takes massive amounts of resources and man hours to manually sort through this data. Wildlife.ai is providing tools to make conservation incredibly more efficient and effective, and leading collaborative learning in this space.
Aotearoa / New Zealand’s unique history means our native flora and fauna are under critical threat from invasive predator species. The good news is we have embarked upon the journey to Predator Free by 2050.
Wildlife. ai is bringing ecologists and technologists together and into the community. Using a charitable trust structure, a huge emphasis on community involvement, teaching youngsters and courageous ambition, Wildlife. ai will bring advanced technologies developed in the private business sector into sustainability efforts.
Then, with educated, skilled and experienced young outdoors people, equipped with powerful new tools, we will have a good chance of saving our taonga species from extinction.
Episode 15 premieres next week, Sunday 18th April 2021.
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This series is made possible by the New Zealand Regeneration Investment Group.

[@gabriellifr3838]

Very cool research!!! In addition to using artificial intelligence (AI) to prevent the extinction of wild animals, they also teach the community about research and how to generate code and use the technology for conservation.

[@darwintejerero2293]

Good work. I'm wondering how I can also emulate such project on my work related to wildlife conservation here in the Philippines. On of our challenges is the illegal wildlife trade using online platforms which we would like to prevent but we don't have the expertise. AI driven system is one of the option we are looking into.

[@justinritter7925]

What you are forgetting is that "you" nor most the rest of us have any control over how AI is developed. That task lies in the hands of few and that's exactly what scares me about it. That's a lot of power over humanity for only a few people to be highly involved with all thw associated choices made.