How vacation photos of zebras and whales can help conservation

Tourists posting vacation photos of zebras and whales on social media may help researchers track and gather information on the species.

Scientists are using artificial intelligence to analyze photos of zebras, sharks and other animals to identify and track individuals and offer new insights into their movements, as well as population trends.

We have millions of images of animals taken by scientists, camera traps, drones and even tourists, according to the director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute at The Ohio State University.

Those images contain a wealth of data that we can use to help protect animals and combat extinction.

Berger-Wolf is a professor of computer science and engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and evolution, ecology and organismsal biology at Ohio and he said that imageomics is taking the use of wildlife images a step further by using artificial intelligence to extract biological information from their photos.

She spoke at the annual meeting of the American Association for the advancement of science about recent advances in using artificial intelligence to analyze wildlife images. She spoke at the scientific session about crowdsourced science and machine learning.

There is a lack of data available on many threatened species.

We don't know how much we're losing and we're losing at an unprecedented rate.

More than half of the 142,000 species on the Red List of Threatened Species are not known because there is not enough data or their population trend is uncertain.

If we want to save African elephants from extinction, we need to know how many there are in the world and how fast they are declining, Berger-Wolf said.

We don't have enough satellite tags to answer questions about the elephants. Machine learning can be used to analyze images of elephants to provide a lot of the information we need.

Berger-Wolf and her colleagues created a system called Wildbook that uses computer vision to analyze photos taken by tourists on vacation and researchers in the field to identify not only species of animals, but individuals.

Even the shape of a whale's fluke or a dolphin can be identified by our artificial intelligence.

Wildbook has more than 2 million photos of whales and dolphins from around the world.

She said that this is one of the primary sources of information scientists have on killer whales.

There are wildbooks for sharks and whales as well as other animals.

Berger-Wolf and her colleagues have developed an artificial intelligence agent that searches publicly shared social media posts for relevant species. She said that many people's vacation photos of sharks they saw in the Caribbean end up being used in Wildbook.

Population counts, birth and death dynamics, species range, social interactions and interactions with other species are some of the things that can be provided by photos.

Berger-Wolf said researchers are looking to move the field forward with imageomics.

She explained that the foundation of imageomics is the ability to extract biological information from images.

If the pattern of stripes on a zebra is similar to that of its mother, can that give information about their genetic similarities? How do the skulls of bat species change with the environment? Machine learning analysis of photos can answer these and many other questions.

The National Science Foundation awarded Ohio State fifteen million dollars in September to create the Imageomics Institute, which will help guide scientists from around the world in this new field. The institute has a principal investigator in Berger-Wolf.

Berger-Wolf said that one key will be to make sure the AI is used ethically and equitably.

Researchers have to make sure it doesn't do any harm. Data must be protected so that it can't be used to target vulnerable species.

It must be more than that.

We have to make sure that it is a partnership between humans and machines. She said that the artificial intelligence should connect among people, data, and geographical locations.

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