How Innovative Technologies Are Protecting Endangered Species and Environments

September 24, 2024

Despite decades of wildlife conservation efforts, the planet is facing an unprecedented decline in biodiversity, according to United Nations statistics. Approximately 28% of species across the planet are threatened with extinction, including 41% of amphibian species, 26% of all mammal species and 34% of conifers.

Wildlife conservation efforts have long depended on tracking and monitoring animals and habitats, but traditional methods have shortcomings.

“Across conservation parks around the world, motion trap cameras and drones are deployed to monitor the habitats of endangered animals and patrol for poachers,” said IEEE Fellow Karen Panetta. “The problem with these approaches is that they require manual labor to review the data being captured and are inhibited by things like forest canopies and low-lighting conditions.”

So, researchers are turning to innovative technologies, including AI and satellite monitoring, to protect animals and habitats around the world.

Here’s a look at some of the best examples of how emerging technologies are helping wildlife conservation efforts.

Monitoring Elephants by Drone

Conservationists typically mount cameras to fixed locations, like trees, to monitor wildlife. But that gives a limited picture of animal activity. It shows what happened at one location and what any particular animal was doing at one point in time.

Panetta is working with a team that includes colleagues from Tufts University to monitor elephants by drone. Her team can identify many species of animals from the air. And using traditional visual light and hyperspectral sensors, her team can tell what an animal is based on its shadow.

Her team’s AI system can also recognize animals from thermal images captured at night, help identify individual members of herds, and assess animals’ health.

This technology helps reduce the need for the practical hazards of tagging animals, where animals are sedated, restrained, and handled by conservation experts.

Using Big Data to Track Illegal Fishing

Environmental regulators rely on transponders called Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) to monitor commercial fishing. These devices tell regulators the speed and location of fishing vessels. These data points are important because location data can be used to identify what types of fish vessels are targeting.

And the speed of vessels is important because ships traveling to a fishing destination travel much faster than ships actively fishing. Occasionally however, there are gaps in the AIS data. Sometimes, this is due to legitimate communication errors, like crowded bandwidth. But other times, it’s because the vessels turn the AIS off.

As this IEEE Access article recounts, researchers have used big data analysis to identify hidden and potentially illegal fishing in the Mediterranean Sea based on the patterns of when vessels had their AIS turned off.

Monitoring fishing patterns in this way is fast, easy and can be done at scale to combat illegal fishing and overfishing.

“In short, researchers are using AI to tell the ‘fact-based story’ that the decline of specific fish species may be due to illegal overfishing,” said IEEE Senior Member Euclides Chuma.

Saving Big Cat Habitats From Space

Large cats, like lions, tigers and jaguars, once roamed huge swaths of the planet. But habitat loss has threatened the viability of these species. Wild tigers, for example, used to be found throughout most of Asia and parts of Europe. Today, they have lost 93% of their historic range, and only 3,700 to 5,500 remain globally.

NASA is working with conservationists to monitor tiger habitats and has actually identified large regions of wildlands where tigers could thrive – if only the cats could get there. If a way could be found to reintroduce tigers to these areas, it could increase available tiger habitats by about 50%.

Similar habitat monitoring efforts are underway for jaguars in South America and elephants in Africa.