Photos of Australian wildlife in bushfire recovery areas, captured and analyzed using artificial intelligence (AI), have given new insights into the journey of vulnerable species back from natural disaster.
Researchers from WWF and Conservation International teamed up with local land managers to collect more than 7 million photos from about 1,100 sensor-activated cameras in eight parts of Australia affected by bushfires in recent years.
They captured a wombat mother with her joey in the New South Wales southern ranges, a rare group of echidnas on Kangaroo Island as well as Kangaroo Island dunnarts, dingo pups in Victoria’s East Gippsland, and koalas in the Blue Mountains and southeast Queensland.
Photo: AFP
The Google AI technology, called Wildlife Insights, was trained on 4 million images of more than 150 Australian animals, and tracked their recovery in the years after bushfires.
The system initially identified wombats as pigs, and kangaroos as deer, WWF Australia’s eyes on recovery program researcher and coordinator Emma Spencer said.
However, the program can now recognize species such as kangaroos and wombats with more than 90 percent accuracy.
The cameras have been in the field in the different locations for a couple of months to three years.
Researchers were most excited about the discovery of the dunnarts on Kangaroo Island, where bushfires ravaged up to 90 percent of their habitat in 2020, Spencer said.
Images of koalas moving around on the ground indicated that the animals were still recovering from fires, she said.
“They might be needing to move around more to find new habitat. They’re moving on the ground rather than being up in trees,” she said.
“They can become a lot more vulnerable to predators when they’re moving along the ground,” she added.
The cameras also tracked a variety of invasive species including foxes, feral cats, pigs and cane toads.
The technology would make it easier to quickly identify threatened species after fires to help with the response, Spencer said.
Although the project had pointed to signs of recovery for wildlife after the last bushfire season, the potential for the next was not far away, she said.
“We’ve had three years of heavy rainfall, and in some cases we’ve actually seen big booms of animals because of that. We’ve also seen huge growth of vegetation, which means higher bushfire risk — potentially this summer,” Spencer said.
“What we’re really hoping for is that these results can help to inform future fire events, which we will expect to get a lot more of due to climate change,” she said.
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