Zoe Jewell, a British conservationist, has spent the past 13 years helping WildTrack develop an artificial intelligence–powered system to identify animals from pictures of their footprints. The work was inspired by Jewell’s experiences working alongside Zimbabweans tracking black rhinoceroses. So far, the AI tool can identify 17 animals, including leopards, lions, and rhinos. But the WildTrack team’s goal is to produce more fine-grained assessments—teaching their machine learning system to identify which individual animal left which print.
When I first pointed the iNaturalist app (which is free to use) at a bunch of grass, I learned not only that it was bottlebrush grass, a shade-tolerant plant native to areas including the eastern United States, but that this grass is a host for many northern pearly-eye butterflies. When I held the Merlin Bird ID app (basically, Shazam for birdsong) up toward a flock my dog was chasing away, I discovered that they were starlings. Days later, inside an airport near Washington, D.C., I heard familiar chirps, and knew that the small, dark birds flapping against the vaulted windows were starlings too. This is the reward of nature identification. With each plant or animal you first learn by phone and later recognize by sight or sound, even some of the most claustrophobic places can remind you of the immensity of the world.
— Shan Wang, programming director