From Pixels to Preservation: How AI Gives Rise to a Birdwatching Revolution
At the interface of ecology and the ever-increasing applications to use artificial intelligence for good, FruitPunch AI and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) joined together to better understand how our ecosystems function. Over decades, passionate ornithologists have been taking thousands of images of birds across the world. In the AI for Eagles Challenge, we exploited this dataset to build a machine learning pipeline that would allow rapid assessment of a bird’s behavior, species, and age. Traditional manual labeling of such images is a time-consuming process, and the need for speed in assessing individual birds and population states underscores the urgency of the task. The successful implementation of AI has the potential to revolutionize the efficiency of bird image analysis. By automating the labeling process, the application can significantly accelerate the assessment of individual birds and contribute valuable insights into the broader state of bird populations.