A social enterprise -based social enterprise called We Spot Turtles receives global attention to combining artificial intelligence with civilian science to protect sea turtles.
So much attention, even that we see turtles and the use of the same name was invited to the UN Ocean Conference, held in France in June.
“Sea turtles literally slide into a quiet extinction,” said co-founder and director Caitlin McKeown, and added that one of the biggest obstacles in preservation efforts was a lack of data.
To solve this problem, we see turtles, anyone with a smartphone can identify both the species and individual turtles of a photo. With the help of Machine Learning it analyzes the unique patterns of the shield of each turtle (hard upper scale) and facial scales to generate data that are critical of retaining and preventing extinction.
The result is that Turtle monitoring, once limited to trained experts and manual tagging, can now be done by everyone on a scale; Dramatically expand the global data collection to fill in critical gaps that have long hindered the conservation efforts.
Pilot programs for the app are held by eight nature conservation organizations around the world, including in France, Costa Rica, Frans Polynesia, Hawaii and Australia.
The We Spot Turtles app also attracted the attention of Google, with Mrs. McKeown and co-founder Nicolas Guillot in a Google Play campaign last year.
Turtle
We are already spotting that Turtles claims to have made an increase of 30 percent possible of the number of turtles per season on existing tagging methods.
“Through our app observations of turtles were registered in more than 400 new beaches or regions that had previously not been investigated or were not fully investigated, so that the global nature conservation footprint was expanded by a maximum of fifteen percent without adding extra staff or overhead costs,” said Mrs. Mckeown, “said Mrs. Mckeown,” “” “” “” Business news.
She said that we see turtles that the collection of data could also make it more accessible to smaller, under -financed organizations by lowering the monitoring costs by lower labor and extensive volunteer data collection.
She is especially enthusiastic about the potential to improve monitoring in places such as Central America and Southeast Asia, where existing capacity is limited.
This growth potential is due to making the app easier, not only for nature conservation organizations, but something that someone can do.
“More than forty percent of the observations in our app come from non-traditional sources, such as tourists, local divers, local children and mourning people,” said Mrs. McKeown.
Data is important
The data collected is crucial for the preservation of sea turtles because it informs the decisions of government policy. The biggest challenge, said Mrs. McKeown, was that many species of sea turtles were classified as ‘data deficiency’, which means that their level of threat is unknown.
“So when scientists go to governments in their respective regions and say,” We want to keep this species because we think it is going out, “the government will ask for evidence that the sea turtle is critically threatened before they have money in the back,” she said.
“Without we see turtles there is no way to do that.”
At a time when we all worry a lot of AI news, we see Turtles an example of how the impact of technology really depends on how we choose to design and use it.
“I think AI is currently a really scary, overwhelming subject for many people,” said Mrs. McKeown, who is president of Bloom’s student Club for young founders at Curtin University.
“And rightly so, because there are many scary things that you can do with it.
“But there are a number of really positive things that we can do with AI and a number of great change that we can make.
“Thanks to AI we can do things such as growing exponential databases about sea turtles, which otherwise are almost not -quantified. Like flatbacks here in West -Australia.”
Come up
The next step before we shift Spot Turtles from the pilot to a subscription model: one for organizations with multiple levels that depend on the size, and another for governments, companies and private companies.
Long term said Mrs. McKeown that the social enterprise wants to expand the platform to follow other endangered species.
It is a glimpse of how we can and should use AI forever, and a reminder that we have that choice.
• Dr. Kate Raynes-Goldie is a business anthropologist, strategic speaker coach, international keynote speaker and LEGO® Serious Play specialist. She is the Chief Connection Officer of the next company and the maker of SuperConnect®
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