AI Can Help Indigenous People Protect Biodiversity

One million species are at risk of extinction, including 1000 wild mammal species and 450 species of sharks and rays. One in five people depend on wildlife for their food and income. The UN wants governments and NGOs to secure land rights for Indigenous peoples who have been proactive in protecting wild species.

I am curious to see what role technology can play in helping to conserve and secure Indigenous land rights. Deep-learning neural networks, an advanced form of artificial intelligence that can improve its performance without being programmed, is revolutionizing the analysis of sound data from at-risk environments. For the 21st century, acoustic monitoring and visual monitoring complement one another. Code-sharing and the use of the technology itself are both subject to restricted access. If the tool isn't made available to rapid-response teams, it will be wasted.

The need for human vigilance isn't lessened by deep- learning neural networks. It opens up a window of time for intervention in places that are plagued by illegal logging and mining because of the advanced artificial intelligence that can analyze sound data in seconds. The technology can hear the sounds of drills and chainsaws. A key part of this new equation is the ability of Indigenous communities to respond instantly.

The Coral Gardeners, from Mo'orea, French Polynesia, were co-developed with one of the first Artificial Intelligence-based Indigenous preservation projects. The Indigenous group cultivates heat- resistant corals and transplants them onto the reef. Cornell provides the software to track the sounds of the many organisms making their home here and, working with the University of Hawaii, integrates them into a recording platform, ReefOS, which collects visual and acoustic data 24 hours a day. The on-site respondents are told if the reefs are starting to sound like healthy and stable reef systems or if more restoration efforts are needed.

It's just as effective with other ecosystems. The San Francisco nonprofit Rainforest Connection was chosen to build the low-cost alert system by the Tembé tribe. The sounds of chainsaws and logging trucks can be heard in the Amazon, thanks to the use of recycled cell phones and an open-sourced artificial intelligence software. When a chainsaw is detected by cloud computing, a text alert goes out to the patrol.

Local politicians want to clear the forests for industrial farming and ranching so this partnership is in jeopardy. One such politician is the mayor of So Félix do Xingu, a city that has some of the highest deforestation rates in Brazil, and where unsolved land-related murders are just as common.

The 2,766 square kilometers of ancestral holdings of the Tembé are difficult to defend due to their small number of members. The forests have already been destroyed. There are people who die. The killings of Indigenous people have gone up in Brazil. The Vatican published an emergency declaration on April 14, 2021, that warned that 202 Indigenous leaders would be murdered in 2020 because of their political bosses.

The consequences for plants and animals are bad. In addition to the Amazon, assault on Indigenous lands has decimated once-flourishing habitats in other parts of the world. Without legal land rights partnerships are impossible.

The World Wildlife Fund has a plan to save 30 percent of Earth by the year 2030. The final draft of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity will be held in Montreal this December. As many as 300 million humans could be evicted from the forest. The 30x30 plan by Biden is not perfect, but it does offer better goals. The U.S. government will honor tribal sovereignty. There will be an inclusive and collaborative approach to the stewardship of land and water resources.

This partnership is powered by artificial intelligence. The presence of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence at this year's Our Ocean Conference is telling. Tracking illegal fishing that depletes fish stocks and threatens local livelihood is one of the things that can be done with the help of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can be used to analyze ocean data, from the songs of whales to the properties of plastic. A $20 million commitment from the National Science Foundation to create an artificial intelligence institute for climate and coastalography raises a lot of hope. It won't all be smooth sailing according to competing demands. The research agenda is driven by the ocean-based blue economy and it will take some doing to integrate it.

The bar was set very high by the conference. Sometimes the Biden administration can't stick to its principles. Two months after Our Ocean 2022, at the Summit of the Americas,Indigenous leaders critical of him were barred from entering. The rhetoric of partnership is often just that, as shown by this incident. The Inflation Reduction Act requires the lease of 60 million acres of off-shore waters and 2 million acres of public lands for oil and gas drilling over the course of 10 years. There is a provision for Native-led climate resilience and adaptation. One way to keep biodiversity alive and relevant is through the use of artificial intelligence.

The views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those ofScientific American.