{"id":236200,"date":"2025-10-24T05:39:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T05:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/236200\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T05:39:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T05:39:07","slug":"bezos-grant-to-fund-ai-innovations-to-monitor-and-protect-wildlife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/236200\/","title":{"rendered":"Bezos grant to fund AI innovations to monitor and protect wildlife"},"content":{"rendered":"

A $1.8 million grant from the\u00a0Bezos Earth Fund<\/a> will help the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics develop acoustic sensors and artificial intelligence analytics to identify real-time threats to forests from illegal activities and provide insights into ecosystem health.<\/p>\n

The Cornell Lab was one of 15 recipients of the Bezos Earth Fund\u2019s AI Grand Challenge for Climate and Nature, to scale AI solutions that address the world\u2019s most pressing environmental challenges \u2013 from biodiversity loss and food insecurity to climate change.<\/p>\n

The Cornell Lab, in collaboration with Mongabay; the Wildlife Conservation Society; Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany; and the Programa de Pesquisa em Biodiversidade do Pantanal and the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil,\u00a0will develop cutting-edge bioacoustic technology to advance conservation monitoring in the Global South, a missing link in today\u2019s biodiversity crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are facing the biggest environmental challenge because of the scale of the changes and the speed at which they\u2019re happening \u2013 it\u2019s effectively a mass extinction that\u2019s happening within decades rather than millennia,\u201d said Ian Owens, director of the Cornell Lab.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, we simply don\u2019t know how wildlife populations are doing, particularly in some of the most biodiverse areas such as in South America, Southeast Asia and Africa. Satellite images help us monitor habitat change, but that\u2019s not enough to uncover what\u2019s happening across all species and research indicates that drastic declines are underway,\u201d Owens said. \u201cWe need to figure out what\u2019s causing the declines and how we can reverse them. We can\u2019t do that using traditional methods and support from the Bezos Earth Fund will help us unlock exactly the kind of efficient, scalable approach we need.\u201d<\/p>\n

Traditional biodiversity monitoring relies on humans to count or observe changes in wildlife populations, but these methods often fall short at the scale needed for conservation. Traditional methods are also difficult to scale up, since only small portions of the land can be monitored at any given time.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology is key to enable comprehensive and timely understanding of wildlife in these regions, and bioacoustics is the best tool for doing that,\u201d Owens said.<\/p>\n

Bioacoustics, the study of animal sounds, is one of the \u201cvery few technologies that enable us to do what is beyond the scope of human observation,\u201d said Holger Klinck, director of the Cornell Lab\u2019s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics. \u201cThe goal is to develop fast, accurate, scalable and affordable methods to monitor biodiversity using microphones to listen in on the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The research team from the Cornell Lab will address real-world conservation challenges using state-of-the-art bioacoustic technology in two highly threatened biodiversity hotspots: Guatemala\u2019s Maya Biosphere Reserve and Brazil\u2019s Pantanal wetland.<\/p>\n

The Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest remaining Mesoamerican tropical forest, is threatened by deforestation, narco-trafficking, fires and poaching. Traditional monitoring efforts have failed to keep pace with these threats.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Guatemala we will be working with a real-time version of this new acoustic recorder that we\u2019re developing with Analog Devices that will run and analyze data in real time in the field, and then report back what\u2019s happening,\u201d Klinck said. \u201cIt\u2019s this kind of groundbreaking technology that is needed to really protect the ecosystem and the people that work in those areas \u2013 no commercial product out there can do what we\u2019re proposing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Farther south, in Brazil\u2019s Pantanal tropical wetland \u2013 the world\u2019s largest \u2013 the team will deploy new technology to monitor wildlife. The Pantanal is home to more than 80 species of mammals, 650 species of birds, 50 of reptiles and 300 of fish, as well as numerous threatened species such as the jaguar, the giant armadillo, the giant anteater and the hyacinth macaw. Unsustainable cattle ranching expansion and large-scale fires threaten this highly diverse ecosystem, which is difficult to monitor using traditional methods.<\/p>\n

The team will develop the first foundation model for natural sounds, providing a fast and flexible tool for sound classification of multiple species across all types of habitats.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis bioacoustic model will enable a much more comprehensive assessment of ecosystems, representing a turning point in biodiversity monitoring and conservation,\u201d said Larissa Sayuri Moreira Sugai,\u00a0the interim assistant director at the Yang Center.<\/p>\n

The project will be the first biome-wide ecosystem health assessment that has ever been conducted in the Global South using acoustics, Klinck said.<\/p>\n

\u201cConservation cannot advance without a solid understanding of what is present and what is at stake,\u201d he said, \u201cand these new tools will allow managers to act in support of biodiversity around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Funding from Bezos Earth Fund will also allow the team to share information with local partners, to deploy the technologies to assist in conservation and decision-making.<\/p>\n

\u201cBioacoustics has been the \u2018silver bullet\u2019 of hope for conservationists for some time, but right now it takes an expert team to do the work at scale,\u201d Owens said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to put together the hardware, software and interfaces to allow conservation decision-makers and researchers to use the technology easily to help reverse biodiversity declines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kathi Borgman is the communications manager for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A $1.8 million grant from the\u00a0Bezos Earth Fund will help the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s K. Lisa Yang…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-236200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}