AI for Wildlife Conservation: RESOLVE's TrailGuard AI

📖 The Story

Who, When, and Where — Context

A US-based environmental organization RESOLVE developed an AI-based wildlife conservation system — which started appearing in news coverage in 2019 and was later recognized in TIME's List of Best Inventions of 2023 for its results in Africa and India.

Why — Challenge

The lives of endangered species like Lions, Mountain Gorillas, Elephants, and Black Rhinos have been threatened at an alarming level as they become victims of poaching, illegal logging, and human-wildlife conflict. Although monitoring reserves is key to preventing such threats, the reserves are often too remote for agencies to implement 24/7 sustainable conservation programs. Even with the support of technology, affordability always comes into question.

What and How — Tech Solution

Together with technology enablement partners including the semiconductor chip manufacturing giant Intel, RESOLVE designed TrailGuard AI, a tiny AI-powered camera device that can be effectively and efficiently deployed in remote areas. Thanks to the optimal hardware design, the camera device — even with its pen-sized physical scale — can relentlessly monitor the fields, detect humans and animals, and alert rangers in real-time, while saving its buttery and storage consumption by AI’s predictive power.

💡 Key Insights

• Remote fields like conservation reserves pose unique challenges to the use of technology, such as poor connectivity and difficulty in frequent maintenance.

• When combined with an optimal hardware design, software solutions — like AI-powered image recognition — become truly useful; the more complex tasks you ask machines to do, the more computational resources are consumed, and hence the higher efficiency is required.

• AI empowers humans, especially when humans are struggling with scarce resources. This is the case for TrailGuard AI as it has boosted the work done by rangers, who need to oversee massive conservation areas.

✅ Try This

Learn how “AI-powered camera” can be developed in the field of computer vision.

📊 Did You Know?

South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal is one of the rhino poaching hotspots, where 325 rhinos were killed in 2023 among 499 rhinos lost in South Africa in the year — WWF reacted to the government-issued figures. The illegal trade of rhino horns is considered one of the major motivations behind the shocking reality.