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AI to track hedgehog populations in pioneering UK project (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 year ago by GreyShuck@feddit.uk to c/nature@feddit.uk

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Artificial intelligence will be used for the first time to track hedgehog populations as part of a pioneering project aimed at understanding how many of them are left in the UK and why they have suffered a decline.

Images of the prickly mammals snuffling around urban parks, private gardens, woodlands and farmland will be captured by cameras and filtered by AI trained to differentiate between wildlife and humans.

The images will then be sent to human “spotters” who will pick out those featuring hedgehogs and send them to analysts, who will record the numbers and locations.

Using this method, the National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme (NHMP) hopes to be able to produce estimates of hedgehog populations in different habitats across the country, show how these are changing year on year, and – in time – give a national estimate of the UK’s hedgehog population.

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[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Images of the prickly mammals snuffling around urban parks, private gardens, woodlands and farmland will be captured by cameras and filtered by AI trained to differentiate between wildlife and humans.

The images will then be sent to human “spotters” who will pick out those featuring hedgehogs and send them to analysts, who will record the numbers and locations.

I know it's the new hot thing (and mentioning it in a project will get attention) but what is AI doing here? They are, presumably, being sent photos of hedgehogs so they are pre-filtered already. Unless it is able to identify individuals, which seems unlikely.

They are also nocturnal and elusive - I currently have four but I've only ever seen one at a time. Where I previously lived I only discovered that I had one when there was a light skim of snow and you could see their tracks coming out off one gate, along the pavement and through next door's (made me think we really should knock a hole in the wall and pass some pipe through).

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

I think your assumption is wrong here. It says the ai has been trained to look for hedgehogs so I imagine it's so people don't have to watch all the footage and manually do counts. Which depending on the number of cameras is unlikely to be doable.