Health & Science

ONE of the top three emerging technologies in aiding conservation and helping protect species around the world is Arti cial Intelligence (AI). ere is a school of thought, from sci- lms to the views of the lateStephen Hawking, that suggests AI could spell doom for humans. But conservationists are increasingly turning to AI as an innovative solution to tackle the biodiversity crisis and battle climate change.

A recent report by Wildlabs. net found that AI was one of the top three emerging technologies in conservation. From camera trap and satellite images to audio recordings, the report said: “AI can learn how to identify which photos out of thousands contain rare species; or pinpoint an animal call out of hours of eld recordings – hugely reducing the manual labour required to collect vital conservation data.”

AI is helping to protect species as diverse as humpback whales, koalas and snow leopards, supporting the work of scientists, researchers and rangers in vital tasks, from antipoaching patrols to monitoring species. With machine learning (ML) computer systems that use algorithms and models to learn, understand and adapt, AI is often able to do the job of hundreds of people, getting faster, cheaper and more e ective results.

Five AI projects contributing to our understanding of biodiversity and species are:

1. Stopping poachers

Zambia’s Kafue national park is home to more than 6,600 African savanna elephants and covers 22,400 sq km, so stopping poaching is a big challenge. Illegal shing in Lake Itezhi-Tezhi on the park’s border is also a problem, and poachers masquerade as shers to enter and exit the park undetected, often under the cover of darkness.

Automated alerts mean that just a handful of rangers are needed to provide around-theclock surveillance.

e Connected Conservation Initiative, from Game Rangers International (GRI), Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife and other partners, is using AI to enhance conventional anti-poaching e orts, creating a 19km-long virtual fence across Lake ItezhiTezhi. Forward-looking infrared (FLIR) thermal cameras record every boat crossing in and out of the park, day and night.

Installed in 2019, the cameras were monitored manually by rangers, who could then respond to signs of illegal activity. FLIR AI has now been trained to automatically detect boats entering the park, increasing e ectiveness and reducing the need for constant manual surveillance. Waves and ying birds can also trigger alerts, so the AI is being taught to eliminate these false readings.

2. Tracking water loss

Brazil has lost more than 15% of its surface water in the past 30 years, a crisis that has only come to light with the help of AI. e country’s rivers, lakes and wetlands have been facing increasing pressure from a growing population, economic development, deforestation, and the worsening e ects of the climate crisis.

But no one knew the scale of the problem until last August, when, using ML, the MapBiomas water project released its results after processing more than 150,000 images generated by Nasa’s Landsat 5, 7 and 8 satellites from 1985 to 2020 across the 8.5m sq km of Brazilian territory. Without AI, researchers could not have analysed water changes across the country at the scale and level of detail needed. AI can also distinguish between natural and human-created water bodies.

3. Finding whales

Knowing where whales are is the rst step in putting measures such as marine protected areas in place to protect them. Locating humpbacks visually across vast oceans is di cult, but their distinctive singing can travel hundreds of miles underwater.

At National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) sheries in the Paci c islands, acoustic recorders are used to monitor marine mammal populations at remote and hard-to-access islands, says Ann Allen, a research oceanographer. “In 14 years, we’ve accumulated around 190,000 hours of acoustic recordings. It would take an exorbitant amount of time for an individual to manually identify whale vocalisations.”

In 2018, NOAA partnered with Google AI for Social Good’s bioacoustics team to create an ML model that could recognise humpback whale song.

4. Protecting koalas

Australia’s koala populations are in serious decline due to habitat destruction, domestic dog attacks, road accidents and bush res. Without knowledge of their numbers and whereabouts, saving them is challenging. Grant Hamilton, associate professor of ecology at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), has created a conservation AI hub with federal and Landcare Australia funding to count koalas and other endangered animals. Using drones and infrared imaging, an AI algorithm rapidly analyses infrared footage and determines whether a heat signature is a koala or another animal. Hamilton used the system after Australia’s devastating bush res in 2019 and 2020 to identify surviving koala populations, particularly on Kangaroo Island.

5. Counting species

Saving species on the brink of extinction in the Congo basin, the world’s second-largest rainforest, is a huge task. In 2020, data science company Appsilon teamed up with the University of Stirling in Scotland and Gabon’s national parks agency (ANPN) to develop the Mbaza AI image classi cation algorithm for large-scale biodiversity monitoring in Gabon’s Lopé and Waka national parks.

Conservationists had been using automated cameras to capture species, including African forest elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees and pangolins, which then had to be manually identi ed. Millions of pictures could take months or years to classify, and in a country that is losing 150 elephants a month to poachers, time matters.

THE quality of sperm quality can be after by air pollution, according to research into samples of 30,000 men in China. e research, published in the journal JAMA Networks, also suggests that the smaller the size of the polluting particles in the air, the greater the link with poor semen quality.

“Our ndings suggest that smaller particulate matter size fractions may be more potent than larger fractions in inducing poor sperm motility,” wrote the authors of the paper. e researchers believe that these ndings highlight yet another reason for the need to reduce exposure to air pollution among men in their reproductive age.

Researchers have long been trying to establish whether there’s a link between air pollution and sperm quality, but it’s been unclear whether the former has adverse health effects on male fertility because the results from studies are often inconsistent among themselves and complicated to put into perspective. ere does appear to be reason to believe that pollution may negatively a ect fertility in general for the whole of the population, as suggested in this international literature review published in December 2021.

Researchers at the School of Medicine of Tongji University in Shanghai

looked at data records from a total of 33,876 men from 340 Chinese cities, aged 34 on average, with a varied degree of exposure to air pollution among them, and whose wives got pregnant through assisted reproduction technology with their sperm between January 2013 and December 2019. ey then looked for patterns between semen quality in relation to whether the participants had been exposed to amounts of particulate matter smaller in diameter than 2.5 micrometres, between 2.5 and 10 micrometres, and 10 micrometres, in various key moments of the 90 days before their visit to the hospital for semen ejaculation.

Although the researchers couldn’t nd a signi cant link between air pollution and sperm quality in terms of sperm count or concentration — they did nd that the more a participant was exposed to smaller particulate matter, the lower both the progressive and the total sperm motility was. Progressive sperm motility is the sperm’s ability to swim forward, while total sperm motility simply refers to the sperm’s ability to swim in general.

Speci cally, when exposed to particulate matter smaller in diameter than 2.5 micrometres. there was an estimated decrease in sperm motility of 3.6%, while when exposed to particulate matter of 10 micrometres in diameter, there was 2.44% less sperm motility. Meaning that it’s possible that di erent size fractions of particulate matter might have differing e ects on semen quality, maybe because the smaller the particulate matter, the more likely it is to travel deeper into the human lungs. e data indicates that the e ects of pollution are more prominent when exposure takes place during the initial part of the 90 days of sperm creation — the one called spermatogenesis — rather than the other two phases. is, in turn, may mean that particulate matter a ects sperm on a genetic level, according to the researchers, but these are just speculations, and there’s more research to be done in this area.

How AI is helping protect the wild ones

Air pollution may weaken our sperm, says study

‘To tackle the biodiversity crisis and battle climate change...