As a mystical and sacred symbol in various cultures, as a protagonist in Disney films or as inspiration in Pablo Neruda's poems, the African elephant has not prevented it from being one of the most sought-after animals on the black market. Every day, 96 wild African elephants are killed for the ivory trade. There seems to be no end to this 'elephant killing': In the Congo Basin, more than 80% of the population has been wiped out by poaching and habitat loss. Even in his Ode to the Elephant, Neruda warned: “The kingdom of elephants and was with salt and blood the generic war in silence”.
The fight to preserve this endangered species is complex and often frustrating, as it is difficult to stop the indiscriminate killing. However, some do not give up, but put their efforts, knowledge and technology at the service of finding solutions.
“I'd like to say that all good ideas are born over a cup of tea or coffee, but that has not been the case...” comments Adam Thompson, Germany's ambassador to the EU Climate Pact and head of IBM's global sustainable finance advisory group.
Technology in nature conservation.
Thompson is a staunch advocate of nature. With a passive house built with 98% renewable energy and a sustainable garden, Thompson is leading by example. He is also a member of the Ocean Frontier Institute's Ocean Advisory Board and has worked at IBM for more than 18 years. Under his leadership, IBM has taken a big step towards environmental protection.
Through personal networks, Thompson learned that an organization called Rebalance Earth, a UK-based nature fund, was already working with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on conservation initiatives. This led to the collaboration between IBM and WWF, announced in August this year, to monitor endangered species, starting with the African forest elephant. This project aims to use camouflaged cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify individual elephants to improve conservation efforts.
According to Thompson, the key is to “quantify the ecosystem services that an elephant provides",” a concept that refers to the elephant's role as “natural capital” The questions raised are technical but fundamental: “Does an elephant destroy low-density vegetation? Does it roam 250 hectares that contribute to increasing biodiversity indicators? How can we use technology to measure these impacts?”
IA in the identification of elephants
In the pilot phase, IBM combined WWF's conservation expertise with its technological capabilities. Using AI-powered Maximo Visual Inspection (MVI) software, images and videos of elephants are analyzed to identify their physical features such as tusks and ear folds, which act like a fingerprint.
Before the introduction of AI, monitoring elephants required extensive manual work, with camera traps capturing only two images per animal. With AI, it is now possible to obtain up to twenty images of a single elephant, improving the accuracy of monitoring and enabling more effective mapping of its movements.
The IBM team also had to adapt to the challenges of the terrain. Thompson notes that stress is a major problem for elephants. The use of tracking transmitters, a common technique for tracking animals, is not possible in these cases as it can increase mortality rates by up to 15%.
Data collection is also a challenge: the staff on site have to manually collect the SD cards from the camera traps. In addition, manual tagging of the elephants is necessary at the beginning of the process so that the AI can learn to distinguish between the individual animals. However, once the algorithm begins to learn, the process is automated so that less human intervention is required.
Scalability of the project and new challenges
Thompson emphasizes that another challenge was improving the imaging techniques. “We had to train the system to distinguish not only between an African and an Asian elephant, but also between forest and desert elephants. That was a challenge, but thanks to our platform, Maximo, we made rapid progress”
The results of these efforts are amazing. Elephant recognition accuracy is over 90%, and the team is excited about the possibility of combining this data with geospatial data to further improve elephant tracking and eventually apply it to other endangered species.
Carbon storage and its impact.
In addition to monitoring, IBM and WWF plan to use their Environmental Intelligence Platform to assess the ecosystems in which elephants live and calculate the financial value of the carbon sequestration services they provide. African forest elephants are critical to the ecological balance and contribute to carbon sequestration in forests.
Each elephant can significantly increase the forest's carbon uptake capacity, which benefits companies looking to offset their emissions and achieve sustainability goals. Thompson points out that elephants not only remove low-density vegetation, but also disperse seeds, which are more likely to germinate as they pass through their digestive system. This promotes forest regeneration and ultimately carbon sequestration.
