AI helping to rid islands of stoats

At first, the stoat looks like a faint smudge in the distance. But as it jumps closer, its sleek body is identified by a heatera and with it detecting camera and with it, a computer-generated alert goes out to Orkney's stoat hunters.

- Severin Carrell

Aided by an artificial intelligence programme trained to detect a stoat's sinuous shape and movement, trapping teams are dispatched to find and kill it.

It is the most sophisticated technology deployed in what is already one of the world's largest mammal eradication projects, with the aim of detecting the few stoats left on Orkney. Conservationists on the islands, off the north coast of Scotland, have already used an array of 9,000 lethal traps and eight specially trained tracking and detection dogs to dispatch nearly 8,000 stoats over the past six years.

At least 30 of the digital cameras will soon be staked out across the moors and coasts of Orkney's mainland, building a network that connects hits from the cameras to computers and mobile apps used by the trapping teams.