Researchers at Charles Sturt University's Gulbali Institute are using artificial intelligence to track Australia's woodland birds, helping to protect species that are disappearing fast.
The team is teaching the AI to recognize bird calls so it can process recordings faster and help with conservation.
Acoustic recorders can capture bird sounds over long periods, but sorting through all that audio takes a huge amount of time. Professor Dave Watson, who's leading the project, said that while these recordings are useful, manually reviewing thousands of hours of bird calls is overwhelming.
To solve this, researchers are labeling thousands of bird sounds to build a custom BirdNET model that can identify different species in just minutes instead of months.
In Melbourne, AI-assisted monitoring picked up calls from critically endangered plains-wanderers, which hadn't been seen in the wild there for over 30 years. Chris Hartnett, Zoos Victoria's threatened species program coordinator, told the Guardian the discovery was "like finding gold."
Finds like this show how AI can help spot and protect species that might otherwise have been missed.
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But AI isn't a perfect solution. Training and running AI models requires a lot of electricity, which means more carbon pollution and higher water use for cooling data centers. While AI can support conservation, it also uses a lot of energy and leads to environmental concerns that need to be managed.
Still, the method applied by the Charles Sturt University researchers is speeding up research, lowering labor costs, and allowing conservation teams to respond quickly while cutting down on the need for manual tracking.
Groups like Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Re:wild are also looking into AI for tracking wildlife, demonstrating how the technology can play a big role in conservation.
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Professor Watson described the moment AI-assisted monitoring started identifying bird calls as a breakthrough, saying, "When you're in the conservation technology space, it's amazing to see these big jumps and breakthroughs where the floodgates open and innovation follows"
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Stable bird populations can help keep forests, wetlands, and grasslands in balance. Protecting their habitats also supports ecosystems that provide clean water and absorb air pollution, which is good news for both wildlife and people.
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