Webinar: Deep Learning for Conservation Ecology

A recent report issued by the WWF states that there has been a catastrophic decline in wildlife population in recent years. A large number of species are threatened with extinction due to a number of factors such as over-exploitation of resources, deforestation and climate change. Certain species have been placed on the IUCN Red List for several years, but further conservation efforts are still urgently required to ensure the survival of the remaining individuals. 

While it is true that the number of individuals in threatened populations is decreasing, there have been considerable conservation efforts to put a halt to this. Ecologists, researchers, and rangers closely monitor the populations, in certain cases by placing microphones and camera-traps into the environment and searching through the recorded audio/images for the species of interest. This non-invasive approach comes with a cost in that huge datasets of audio or images are produced and is difficult to manually process. 

This talk will discuss our group’s efforts in using machine learning to monitor certain species, including the Vulnerable Thyolo Alethe in Malawi, the critically endangered Hainan gibbon in China, the Endangered African penguin in the Western Cape and beaked whales in the North Atlantic sea.