AI Fighting Animal Extinction
Wild Me, a Portland-based nonprofit organization that focuses on combatting extinction with citizen science and artificial intelligence, is a project funded and featured by the AI for Earth program. This deeper level of investment and engagement will enable Wild Me, and its wide range of users and supporters, to more effectively and efficiently use software and AI to combat extinction.
There is a clear indication that the world is facing a major biodiversity crisis. Wild Me’s work, however, in harnessing computer vision and machine learning to monitor and track individual animals is truly groundbreaking. With artificial intelligence, Wild Me’s conservation impact has accelerated even further by enabling wider usage of its open-source algorithms through making them available on Microsoft Azure as APIs and boosting the speed and accuracy of its entire Wildbook platform by migrating it over to Azure.
Wildbook is an open-source, cloud-based software platform — created by Wild Me in collaboration with faculty and students at Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Chicago — that brings together AI, computer vision, scientific research and citizen science to help protect endangered species. Using images uploaded from conservationists, researchers and citizen scientists, the software helps identify and track animal populations, monitor their migrations and interactions, and evaluate threats to inform and improve conservation efforts.
In a world where over 90 thousand animals are considered extremely endangered, artificial intelligence can be an efficient game changer in recognizing species populations all over the world in an effort to identify and protect the organisms that need it the most.