Endangered Elephants Tracked From Space By Artificial Intelligence

The world-first study opens the door to more effective methods of monitoring the movements of endangered species

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An international team of scientists from the University of Bath, the University of Oxford and the University of Twente in the Netherlands, have successfully used satellite-based cameras coupled with deep-learning algorithms to track the movements of African elephants. The population of African elephants has plummeted over the last few decades, thanks to poaching and loss of habitat. The species is now classified as endangered, with just 50,000 individuals left in the wild. Currently, conservationists monitor the populations of endangered and under-threat animals, such as elephants, by counting them one by one from low-flying aeroplanes. But in this study, the team used an automated artificial intelligence system created by Dr Olga Isupova, a computer scientist at the University of Bath, to analyse high-resolution images of the elephants as they moved through forests and g