This Google-Built Technology is Harnessing AI to Monitor and Protect Wildlife

THINK

Aug 29

Wildlife Insights is a global database created in collaboration with Google and seven leading conservation organizations, which provides a cloud-based software platform to manage millions of camera-trap conservation images.

Habitat destruction, the illegal wildlife trade, and climate catastrophe are threatening animals all across the planet. An estimated one million species are at risk of extinction, according to a 2019 UN report on biodiversity - a rate that is rapidly accelerating. To help protect at-risk species, scientists are searching for solutions, one of which could lie in this diverse camera trap database that is a game-changer when it comes to monitoring wildlife populations and movements.

Thousands of camera traps with infrared triggers are installed by scientists and field teams every year, giving an unparalleled look into the behaviors and habitats of wildlife populations. Millions of images are documented daily, but there is a drawback to all this data: it takes a long time to sort through and requires painstaking analysis, meaning so much of it is never used or shared.

Wildlife Insights offers a groundbreaking solution to overcome these barriers. The online portal is a partnership between Google and seven conservation organizations that uses artificial intelligence to speed up the photo analysis process.

Featuring more than 4.5 million photographs dating back to 1990, the database offers the conservation community access to reliable and timely information on wildlife. By combining technology and science-based analytics, Wildlife Insights enables conservationists to better manage protected areas, help empower indigenous and local communities in conservation, and bring the best data and science closer to decision makers.

The site also encourages NGOs, governments, and citizen scientists to help grow the database by uploading their own on-camera trap images from around the world.

“In today’s increasingly digital age, big data and artificial intelligence have the power to transform the fate of many endangered species,” said Margaret Kinnaird, the Wildlife Practice Leader for WWF, one of the conservation organizations involved in the initiative. “Wildlife Insights promises to bring millions of unseen images to life and apply them to critical conservation decisions.”

In the past, people who monitor wildlife using sensors like camera traps have had a significant big data challenge. Manually reviewing millions of images to find animals can be time-consuming, particularly as camera traps produce an enormous number of images to analyze, many of which are blank. On average, human experts can label 300 to 1,000 images per hour. Wildlife Insights can classify the same images up to 3,000 times faster, analyzing 3.6 million photos an hour. The AI also automatically removes blank images, saving researchers weeks or months of precious time.

“Optimizing the amount of time that humans spend reviewing wildlife data is a great problem for Google's AI and Google Cloud Platform to help solve,” said Tanya Birch, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach. “Wildlife Insights will put wildlife on the map, for the first time visualizing the world’s largest collection of camera trap-based wildlife observations. With wildlife data available for the world to see in near-real time, anyone can better understand where wildlife is, so we can better protect wild animals and their habitats."

Furthermore the database can identify animal species and provides analytics that can show trends in species’ populations. Google’s AI models have been trained to recognize about 614 animal species, but this will increase over time as more data is collected.

“Humanity and the way we feed, fuel and finance our societies and economies is pushing nature and the services that power and sustain us to the brink,” said Dr Andrew Terry, Director of Conservation, Zoological Society of London. “It’s crucial now more than ever that the conservation community comes together and collaborates with governments and industry, to develop new solutions which massively scale our combined impact and reverse this detrimental trend for both people and wildlife.

“Wildlife Insights is at the pinnacle of these ideals – harnessing the power of AI and providing citizens, companies and governments the ability to react with urgency – something biodiversity so desperately needs.”

A wild boar captured on camera trap in Bhutan. Credit: Emmanuel Rondeau/WWF

Learn more about Wildlife Insights and watch the documentary film Eyes in the Forest: Saving Wildlife In Colombia Using Camera Traps and AI. The film tells the story of a camera trapper who uses Wildlife Insights to document and preserve the biological diversity in Caño Cristales, a reserve in Colombia’s remote upper Amazon region.

Launched in 2020, Wildlife Insights is a collaboration between Conservation International, Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Map of Life, World Wide Fund for Nature, Wildlife Conservation Society, Zoological Society of London, Google Earth Outreach, built by Vizzuality, and supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

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