The power of AI has been harnessed to rapidly clear a photography and video bottleneck and bring greater coordination and computing power to efforts to save Australian animals from extinction.
Developed by researchers at The University of Queensland in partnership with the ARDC, QCIF Digital Research, and TERN, the Wildlife Observatory of Australia (WildObs) can quickly analyse millions of images taken by hidden wildlife cameras, meaning faster, more accurate data to guide conservation work.
Associate Professor Matthew Luskin from UQ’s School of the Environment said the new cloud-based, easy to use, artificial intelligence-powered image platform was revolutionary.
“Affordable cameras can discreetly capture wildlife while strapped to trees and left for months, so there are now thousands of projects across Australia collecting millions of images and videos,” Dr Luskin said.
“We have unprecedented visibility into the natural world, but we were struggling to turn that information into timely, actionable data and decisions to help stem Australia’s biodiversity crisis.
“In one collaborative space, the WildObs platform now hosts all of Australia’s AI computer vision models for fauna. These have been trained specifically for Australian animals and environments – they can identify hundreds of species in camera trap images, 10 times faster than people.
“In conservation, timing matters and detecting problems early can mean the difference between recovery and extinction.”
WildObs uses AI species classifiers to:
Dr Luskin said WildObs was set up to improve national collaboration between scientists, governments and environmental groups working on wildlife monitoring.
“The WildObs platform is an easy end-to-end solution for all researchers,” he said.
“Users just upload images and WildObs stores and processes them in the cloud.
“The results can be downloaded or viewed with interactive dashboards.
“We asked Australian users what they wanted and ecologists worked with an international team of computer scientists to build this platform to suit them.”
The image platform was built with QCIF Digital Research, Agouti, Wageningen University, and INBO.
It hosts image classifiers developed by the WildObs-QCIF team along with Google’s SpeciesNet, AWC135 from the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, with the Tasmanian species recognition model from UTAS and the Victorian Species Recognition Model by AddaxAI currently in the pipeline.
“People in Australia were training AI models, but there was no way to easily use them,” Dr Luskin said.
“Now anyone can host their AI species classifier on WildObs, allowing new users to access and run it easily, and harness our massive storage and powerful computers.
“Better data use can directly improve conservation outcomes – more effective protection of threatened species, smarter investment in conservation, and stronger environmental reporting.”
The revolution in continental-scale environmental observation is here. WildObs is a critical component of the ARDC Planet Research Data Commons (Planet RDC), which is designed to overcome the biggest data challenges faced by earth and environmental science researchers. WildObs is delivered through the Planet RDC’s National Machine Observation Processing Infrastructure (MODS). MODS provides the shared national backbone – including infrastructure, services and standards – that empowers researchers and ecologists to process vast amounts of camera trap data via WildObs, and audio recorder data through Open Ecoacoustics.
“Machine observations are transforming how we understand biodiversity at a continental-scale,” said Hamish Holewa, Director of the Planet Research Data Commons, ARDC. “Through the Planet Research Data Commons and MODs program, the ARDC is helping develop enduring research infrastructure needed to process the rapidly growing volumes of image and acoustic data being generated across Australia.
“WildObs is an exemplar of collaboration across NCRIS capabilities and, in the year NCRIS marks its 20th anniversary, symbolises the value of long-term national partnerships such as ARDC and TERN in delivering infrastructure that helps researchers meet Australia’s biodiversity and environmental challenges,” said Hamish.
Learn more about WildObs.
WildObs was started with seed money from UQ’s Centre for Conservation Science and the School of the Environment. The project is a co-investment partnership between UQ, the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) (DOI: 10.3565/bvg2-b035), QCIF Digital Research, and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN). WildObs image platform was a collaborative project with Agouti, Wageningen University, and INBO in Europe, and we acknowledge their providing foundational support. WildObs is hosted by the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud. ARDC and TERN are enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). WildObs has been shaped by scientists at universities in all states and territories, national and state governments, and NGOs such as Bush Heritage.
This article is based on a media release by The University of Queensland.
