Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way we do things. One exciting area is how it can help protect wildlife, like threatened frogs and birds. In 2023, Dr. Rupert Mathwin and Professor Skye Wassens from Charles Sturt University used AI to study 5 threatened species – one frog and 4 waterbirds. They wanted to see how Commonwealth environmental water (CEW) helps these species survive.
They developed the AI models to recognise the relationship between:
- where the threatened species were found
- the wetting and drying patterns in wetlands
- deliveries of CEW.
Then, they asked the AI models to guess whether the species would be found in wetlands that the AI hadn’t seen before. Some guesses were very accurate. For example, the model for the Australasian bittern was right 95.5% of the time, while the model for the Australasian shoveler was right 75% of the time.
These results show how important CEW is for helping threatened species. The models also taught us about the wetland conditions that each species prefers. But the most exciting part? These AI tools can help decision-makers plan water deliveries to protect threatened species. Having this information could allow water managers to test different strategies to find the best one before taking action.
AI in conservation is still new, but in the age of ‘big data’, these models can help us better protect wetland species.
Read more in the 2022–23 Species Diversity evaluation report.
