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One of Brazil’s top scientists, Eneas Salati, once said, “The best thing you could do for the Amazon rainforest is to blow up all the roads.” He wasn’t joking. And he had a point. In an article published today in Nature, my colleagues and I show that illicit, often out-of-control road building is imperilling forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The roads we’re studying do not appear on legitimate maps. We call them “ghost roads”. What’s so bad about a road? A road means access. Once roads are bulldozed into rainforests, illegal loggers, miners, poachers and landgrabbers arrive. Once they get access, they can destroy f...... Read Full article on GretAi

The island of Jersey is known for its picturesque scenery and mild climate. However, its proximity to the European continent has placed it in the path of an invasive predator: the Asian hornet, Vespa velutina. This is bad news for the island’s wildlife, but makes Jersey an ideal location for testing new methods to combat the hornets. Using the island as a testbed, our team of biologists and data scientists have developed an AI system that can automatically detect Asian hornet invasions into new regions, enabling their eradication before they can gain a foothold. The system, VespAI, identifies Asian hornets with over 99% accuracy, as d...... Read Full article on GretAi

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – models that process large and diverse datasets and make predictions from them – can have many uses in nature conservation, such as remote monitoring (like the use of camera traps to study animals or plants) or data analysis. Some of these are controversial because AI can be trained to be biased, but others are valuable research tools. Biologist Daniele Silvestro has developed an AI tool that can help identify conservation and restoration priorities. We asked him to tell us more about how it works and what it offers. How does your artificial intelligence tool for conservation work? Artificial intellige...... Read Full article on GretAi