Artificial Intelligence: A New Weapon in the Fight Against Illegal Wildlife Trafficking.

The illegal wildlife trade is a multibillion-dollar industry in which animals are taken from their habitats and traded globally as either food, pets, medicines, trophies or clothes. After habitat loss, this presents the biggest threat to many endangered species. Advances in technology and connectivity around the world has allowed the internet to become a major market for wildlife products. As social media avenues like Facebook and Instagram continue to popularise obscure animals, the demand for unique pets skyrockets with it.

Screenshot: instagram

From Viral to Vulnerable

Slow lorises are a small primate found in Southeast Asia. When footage of the wide eyed mammals being tickled and eating rice balls swept through social media, they quickly became a viral sensation.

Screenshot: Instagram

The online craze brought with it a surge of public interest and in turn added fuel to one of their biggest threats: the illegal pet trade. In addition to habitat loss, the booming black market demand for these animals as pets is depleting their wild populations, where all eight species of slow loris are now considered vulnerable and the Javan slow loris is listed as critically endangered.

Computer Conservationists

Enrico Di Minin is a conservation scientist from the University of Helsinki, where he leads the Helsinki Lab of Interdisciplinary Conservation Science. Enrico’s lab focuses on investigating the illegal wildlife trade on social media and other digital platforms, developing methods to track the trade using artificial intelligence (AI). The algorithms are able to classify image setting such as birds in a cage at a market, or bird specific calls in audio, creating what is known as a neural network.

“By using specific training datasets, neural networks are used to recognise and classify species and wildlife products from images contained in social media posts, while also classifying image settings,” Enrico says. “We are currently advancing the development of machine learning algorithms to automatically identify text, image and video content pertaining to illegal wildlife trade”.

AI: Friend Not Foe

So what exactly is artificial intelligence? Despite what they suggest in movies, artificial intelligence doesn’t mean that robots will come alive and turn against the human race. Instead it is the development of computer systems that are able to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence. This includes things such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making and language translation.

Enrico and his team of researchers are on the forefront of developing and using AI methods to effectively monitor the illegal wildlife trade on social media. However, despite these advancements, there are still some difficulties and challenges that lay ahead.

“The biggest challenge is to create training datasets that can be used to enhance the accuracy of the algorithms,” Enrico says. “Our challenge is to overcome this issue by determining the best tradeoff between accuracy and the amount of labeled data we will need for identifying these species and products,” Enrico added.

Conservation Scientist Enrico Di Minin leads the leads the Helsinki Lab of Interdisciplinary Conservation Science. His team investigates the use of AI to track the illegal wildlife trade on digital platforms and social media.