On Monday, March 3 at noon US ET, the Ecological Forecasting Initiative and the ESA Statistical Ecology Section are co-hosting Dr. Sara Beery and Timm Haucke (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) who will present on "Ecological Modeling with AI and Python"
You can register to join the call at: https://bit.ly/4dbtALA Computer vision and biodiversity monitoring is an emerging field that combines artificial intelligence with ecological research to improve the accuracy and efficiency of wildlife tracking. By using machine learning algorithms to automatically analyze large datasets of wildlife images from camera traps and other sources, this technology enables real-time identification and monitoring of species. Computer vision techniques offer scalable solutions for conservationists and ecologists to assess biodiversity, track population trends, and understand species interactions, making it a critical tool for addressing global challenges in biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management. This seminar will demonstrate a Python workflow to use AI models to automatically process large image datasets, test the accuracy of those models, and perform downstream ecological modeling. We will illustrate this process using BioCLIP, a general AI model that was trained on 450,000 taxonomic labels, to classify a large set of camera trap images. We will then assess the quality of those classifications given a relatively small set of human species annotations. Since camera traps are imperfect detectors (i.e. they fail to detect some animals) and AI models are imperfect classifiers (i.e. they miss or confuse the species of some detections), naively drawing conclusions from that data might be suboptimal. To transform the classifications into ecologically useful insights, we will instead use them to fit an occupancy model, which can tell us whether sites are occupied by a species of interest while accounting for imperfections in detection and classification. Details about the seminar series and recordings from previous seminars are at: https://ecoforecast.org/workshops/statistical-methods-seminar-series/ To unsubscribe from this list please go to https://community.esa.org/confirm/?u=RhPWqPxFwODKvbkiT32nkIqRrsiSgulp
