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Conservation Meets Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence is opening an exciting world of possibilities for saving species
Source: Australian Geographic - Owen Cumming - October 3, 2023

The unfathomable expanse of the Southern Ocean presents a problem for anyone studying it.
Half a century of audio recordings has shown the waters around Antarctica are teeming with life. So much, in fact, it would take decades for researchers such as Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) bioacoustics expert Dr Brian Miller to manually analyse all the data. Brian’s work focuses on identifying and understanding the behaviours of Antarctic marine mammals by listening to underwater audio recordings, notably the calls of blue whales. “There are species in the Antarctic that make a lot of noise but aren’t encountered very frequently, so you can learn a lot by listening for them,” Brian explains. “There are dozens of species of animals…and they all make a variety of noises.” 

The diversity of species Brian is listening for means there’s a huge volume of information to deal with. Sorting through it is a massive task. “We’ve now amassed a collection of more than 100,000 hours of recordings from the Antarctic, but we’ve always been constrained by our ability to process these data efficiently,” he says. Listening to all these recordings would take decades. As well as being monotonous to do, that’s simply too slow for the conservation action needed to save threatened species. A time-saving solution has been for Brian’s team to apply AI algorithms to the task. “It’s a fantastic time to be marrying up AI, or machine-learning techniques to be more specific, with conservation work, and it fits particularly well with acoustics,” Brian says. 

During the past decade, the growing sophistication of AI algorithms has rapidly accelerated scientists’ ability to process information. And it couldn’t come at a better time. With eco-systems on the brink of collapse around the world, the race is on to fix environmental problems before it’s too late. It’s one of the greatest challenges humans have ever faced, and the actions we take all hinge on how well we understand different environments. 

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