In the desert plains of Northern Kenya is an unusual sight. Hundreds of people from around the world and different walks of life – data scientists, wildlife biologists, local government officials, and even school kids – have gathered. And they’re armed. With cameras.
It’s the Great Grevy’s Rally, a national census of the endangered Grevy’s zebra, and the group’s mission is to use the photographs they take with their GPS-enabled cameras to save the species. In fact, it just might be humanity’s best shot at saving the Grevy’s zebra and protecting a way of life. In this episode of Teamistry, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite discovers how a shared mission, and a shared technology platform supporting the work of diverse teams, is saving animals – and the biodiversity of the planet. This is the story of Wildbook, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform that processes millions of photographs to create a live database that empowers researchers to track the size and movements of endangered animal populations. Wildbook is like Instagram… for whale sharks, giraffes, and jaguars. This story illustrates how AI specialists and conservationists stationed in different continents and cultures can work together through the common language of technology. And how, through the power of digital photography and a shared mission, this work is keeping the Grevy’s zebras and other endangered species from extinction. We hear from Tanya Berger-Wolf, co-founder of Wildbook and Jason Holmberg, co-founder of WildMe: the organization that created and runs Wildbook. And Rosemary Warungu, zebra project manager at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, and Daniel Rubenstein, a behavioural ecologist at Princeton University, explain how Wildbook’s global community is helping change local attitudes towards the Grevy’s zebra – one photo at a time.
