“Conservationists are using AI to help them detect and eradicate the last remaining invasive stoats on the Orkney Islands, which have devastated local bird populations,” reports The Doomslayer.
The Guardian explains that when a stoat’s “sleek body is identified by a heat-detecting camera,”
an alert goes out to Orkney’s stoat hunters. Aided by an artificial intelligence program trained to detect a stoat’s sinuous shape and movement, trapping teams are dispatched with the explicit aim of finding and killing it. It is the most sophisticated technology deployed in one of the world’s largest mammal eradication projects, which has the aim of detecting the few stoats left on Orkney.
Conservationists on the islands, which sit in the far north of Scotland, have already used an array of 9,000 lethal traps and eight specially trained tracking and detection dogs to dispatch nearly 8,000 stoats over the past six years. At least 30 of those digital cameras will soon be staked out across the moors and coasts of Orkney’s mainland, building a network that connects hits from the cameras to computers and mobile apps used by the trapping teams…
The latest survey data suggests the project has succeeded. Since it began in 2019, there has been a 1,267% increase in the chance of curlew hatchings, a 218% rise in vole activity and a 64% increase in hen harriers numbers. Hen Harriers are heavily persecuted by gamekeepers on the UK mainland, but now Orkney is home to 160.
22 seabird species have returned to Mexico’s Pacific Islands, mainly due to efforts to remove invasive species that killed them or destroyed their habitat. Conservationists “removed 60 populations of invasive mammals from 39 islands: rats, cats, mice, dogs, donkeys, goats, and rabbits. With invasive mammals gone, the stage was set for seabirds to return. Even after the mammal invaders are removed it’s not always easy to convince seabirds to recolonize an island.”
Artificial intelligence is being used to save whales and detect wildfires before they spread.
“Seabirds, crabs, geckos, and native flora are flourishing on Bikar Atoll and Jemo Islet—two small islands in the Marshalls—after conservationists successfully eradicated invasive rats,” reported The Doomslayer.
