The Applications of Artificial Intelligence on the Conservation of Biodiversity

A special issue of Diversity (ISSN 1424-2818). This special issue belongs to the section "Biodiversity Conservation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2024 | Viewed by 1539

Special Issue Editors

Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Interests: statistics; wildlife survey; conservation planning; animal movement; species distribution modelling; machine learning
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Guest Editor
Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture, Mississippi State University, Mississippi, MS 39762, USA
Interests: avian migration; AI and machine learning; spatiotemporal dynamics in ecology; wildlife population ecology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Biodiversity loss is one of the greatest environmental crises and challenges since the Anthropocene epoch. Globally joint conservation efforts are needed to revert the ongoing trend of biodiversity loss. Science-based decisions of global or regional biodiversity conservations have become more data driven with an increasing number of applications of innovative digitalized data acquisitions. Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have revolutionized and automated important inferences from such data to facilitate timely decision-making processes with rapid and even “online” inferences. Such AI-assisted timely inferences are critically important for the conservations of biodiversity under the rapidly changing environments. Successful examples of applications of AI and ML in biodiversity conservation include, but are not limited to, identification of biodiversity hotspots and high-risk areas, monitoring of changes in biodiversity and organism abundances across space and time, detection of poverty regions, and reconstruction or prediction of wildlife movement trajectories using computer vision, deep learning, natural language processing, and robots. Machine Learning and AI have become popular tools for conservation biologists, ecologists, and natural resources managers. However, ML and AI by and large use black box approaches to data inferences. The current generation of AI technologies heavily rely on large amounts of training data, which are rarely structured following ecological processes. Therefore, we call for contributions to this Special Issue in two general categories: (1) innovative ideas of incorporating AI into the conceptual framework and theories of biodiversity conservation biology and ecology; and (2) case studies of innovative applications of ML, natural language processing, deep learning, and robotics in the monitoring and decision making of the conservation of genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity. We hope that this Special Issue provides a venue for applied data scientists, conservation biologists, and natural resource managers to work together to develop AI and ML technologies that improve the mechanistic understanding of mechanisms and processes underlying biodiversity losses and developing the optimal strategies for biodiversity conservations and sustainability of natural resources. Thank you in advance for your contributions to this Special Issue!

Dr. Xinhai Li
Prof. Dr. Guiming Wang
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • machine learning
  • natural language processing
  • natural resource sustainability
  • conservation of biodiversity
  • biodiversity

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

18 pages, 10035 KiB  
Article
Improved Wildlife Recognition through Fusing Camera Trap Images and Temporal Metadata
by Lei Liu, Chao Mou and Fu Xu
Diversity 2024, 16(3), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/d16030139 - 23 Feb 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1003
Abstract
Camera traps play an important role in biodiversity monitoring. An increasing number of studies have been conducted to automatically recognize wildlife in camera trap images through deep learning. However, wildlife recognition by camera trap images alone is often limited by the size and [...] Read more.
Camera traps play an important role in biodiversity monitoring. An increasing number of studies have been conducted to automatically recognize wildlife in camera trap images through deep learning. However, wildlife recognition by camera trap images alone is often limited by the size and quality of the dataset. To address the above issues, we propose the Temporal-SE-ResNet50 network, which aims to improve wildlife recognition accuracy by exploiting the temporal information attached to camera trap images. First, we constructed the SE-ResNet50 network to extract image features. Second, we obtained temporal metadata from camera trap images, and after cyclical encoding, we used a residual multilayer perceptron (MLP) network to obtain temporal features. Finally, the image features and temporal features were fused in wildlife identification by a dynamic MLP module. The experimental results on the Camdeboo dataset show that the accuracy of wildlife recognition after fusing the image and temporal information is about 93.10%, which is an improvement of 0.53%, 0.94%, 1.35%, 2.93%, and 5.98%, respectively, compared with the ResNet50, VGG19, ShuffleNetV2-2.0x, MobileNetV3-L, and ConvNeXt-B models. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on different national park camera trap datasets. Our method provides a new idea for fusing animal domain knowledge to further improve the accuracy of wildlife recognition, which can better serve wildlife conservation and ecological research. Full article
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