How Can AI Be Used to Aid Conservation?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has instigated a plethora of changes and innovations in many industries worldwide in recent years. Organizations across sectors like healthcare, finance, tech, and many others are constantly seeking ways in which they can leverage the power of AI to help boost employee productivity, operational efficiency and accuracy, and reap numerous other benefits.

Another field that has seen demonstrable advantages as a result of integrating AI into its fabric is wildlife conservation. AI has significant potential to advance conservation efforts and solve some of the sector’s most prominent and pervasive challenges. 

With AI applications in conservation on the rise, organizations can expect to gain more accurate and valuable insights, improve the effectiveness and speed of actions that combat environmental destruction, and ultimately, ensure that animals, humans and their habitats are able to coexist harmoniously. Much like how businesses are pivotal in helping the fight against climate change, their utilization of AI can also prove similarly effective if they are actively involved in conservation.

Benefits of AI in the fight against ecological destruction

In a rapidly evolving world that is plagued with disruption and change, AI has provided benefits to eco-conscious organizations in a multitude of ways. To summarize, some benefits of AI in conservation include:

• Improved accuracy and relevancy of ecosystem and biodiversity monitoring.
• Detection of real-world threats like poaching and pollution, as well as cyber threats that pose a risk to information, data and finances.
• Automation of repetitive, manual and time-consuming tasks, thus freeing human experts to focus on other, more strategic duties.
• Generation of complex insights and strategies to help guide top-level conservation efforts.

Are there any drawbacks of AI?

There are also some minor considerations as far as AI in environmental conservation is concerned. AI is, at its root cause, a series of algorithms that are trained with data to recognize patterns and replicate results that follow them. If the aggregated data is biased, it may lead to inaccurate or skewed results. 

On top of this, AI tools and programs in their current iterations require substantial human judgment, supervision and oversight to ensure validity and accuracy. AI systems must be appropriately maintained, operated and patched to ensure that all potential vulnerabilities are thwarted and contained, much like how a security center would provide managed detection and response services.

There are also increased rumblings gathering steam that predict heavy, large-scale job disruption if AI is not treated with effective regulation and legislation. However, AI’s benefits in protecting natural habitats, endangered species, biodiversity, and preserving land space are clear. Though it begs the proverbial question of how organizations that are firmly ingrained in conservation efforts can utilize such a phenomenon to aid their work. Let’s take a look at some of the key ways that AI can be used to help conservation activities.

5 Ways that AI can help conservation efforts

Recognizing images

AI tools can be trained to detect and recognize plants, animals and terrain, as well as important objects within images. The algorithms can be refined to suit an organization’s preferred output.

AI-based image recognition can help conservationists monitor biodiversity and species endangerment over specific areas, whether it’s spotting rare plant species that have sprouted or identifying individual animals like polar bears and tigers that have relocated. 

Analyzing a series of images over time can also help conservation specialists track population numbers and movement patterns.

Detecting patterns and false positives

One of AI’s greatest strengths is its ability to spot patterns, anomalies and false positives in even some of the most complex and expansive datasets. Data is crucial to help conservationists monitor ecosystems and detect disturbances or threats, as well as address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and mounting dangers to millions of species.

AI has been widely used to detect signs of rainforest logging or illegal mining, by analyzing changes in water quality or vegetation. These pattern changes can be subtle or drastic, which, if the latter, could potentially indicate signs of pollution or poaching.

Identifying and tracking species

Plant and animal species identification requires the expert knowledge of human conservationists. While this task can eat up many hours, AI can boost efficiency by helping to identify and track species in imagery, audio recordings and videos. 

AI-based apps help users identify plant and animal species in the wild using inputs from a mobile phone camera, and large-scale models can be adopted in widespread conservation efforts. Scientists can also benefit from using AI to identify species in their efforts to monitor local, regional or national biodiversity.

Automating processes

AI exists primarily as a way to automate repetitive and time-consuming processes such as transcribing audio files, geotagging species or sorting and classifying images. By liberating conservationists from these laborious tasks, they can be more productive in higher-level activities, like planning and strategizing the organization’s next move. 

Incidentally, AI is also being used to autonomously generate templates for important documentation, plans and strategy outlines that derive from aggregated and collated data about species, habitats, and threats.

Generating insights derived from Machine-Learning (M/L)

AI, with the help of powerful machine-learning techniques, can produce insights and patterns based on a wide range of ecological databases. 

AI/ML processes have been used to predict future population spread under climate change, as an example. They have also been instrumental in helping conservationists identify habitats and reveal illegal networks in overseas trade. 

Identifying these insights can help conservation organizations decide on which proactive strategies to take. 

AI and human intelligence must work together

There is no doubting the potential that exists with integrating AI into conservation activities and applications. However, entrusting entire processes to AI algorithms and computers is still a very risky move; human knowledge, planning and execution are still crucial. That said, AI can evidently provide valuable assistance in helping make conservationists’ lives and jobs easier, whether it’s identifying threats, producing insights, or automating tasks. 

As eco-conscious and sustainability-minded individuals, we must not be dictated by the emergence of powerful AI solutions and tools which are only going to grow in availability and influence in the coming years. We must exercise caution when implementing the tools into our conservation practices, and rather than view them as direct replacements for hard-working individuals, strategically utilize them as tools to solve our environmental challenges. 

With careful human judgment in place, AI’s future in conservation looks increasingly promising, and we gain a strong chance to better understand and protect our planet’s ecosystems and resources. However, we will only see the true benefits of our efforts if we are mindful and proactive in addressing all of AI’s inherent risks and considerations.

While not a silver bullet, AI proves a crucial aid for advancing conservation and ensuring the field is not left behind. The key takeaway here is that artificial and human intelligence must, at present, coexist to drive breakthroughs in sustainability and environmental conservation that protect our planet now and in the future.