In Brazil, they hope to use AI to save wildlife from roadkill

In Brazil, where around 16 wild animals die every second, a computer scientist has come up with a futuristic solution to this everyday problem: using AI to alert drivers to their presence.

Direct attacks on the vast South American country’s extensive road network pose the greatest threat to countless species, which are forced to live ever closer to humans.

According to the Brazilian Center for Road Ecology (CBEE), around 475 million vertebrates die on the road every year – mainly smaller species such as capybaras, armadillos and opossums.

“It is the largest direct impact on nature in Brazil today,” CBEE coordinator Alex Bager told AFP.

Shocked by the carnage in the most biodiverse country in the world, computer science student Gabriel Souto Ferrante took action.

The 25-year-old started by identifying the five medium and large species most likely to be victims of road accidents: the puma, the giant anteater, the tapir, the maned wolf and the jaguarundi, a type of wild cat.

Souto, who is pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), then created a database of thousands of images of these animals and trained an AI model to recognize them in real time.

Numerous tests followed and were successful, according to the results of his efforts recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Souto collaborated with the USP Institute for Mathematical and Computer Sciences.

To make the project a reality, Souto says scientists will need “support from the companies that manage the roads,” including access to traffic cameras and “edge computing” devices — hardware that can relay a real-time warning to drivers like some. navigation apps do.

Input would also be needed from the road concession companies, “to remove or capture the animal,” he told AFP.

It is hoped that by reducing wildlife attacks, the technology will also save human lives.

– ‘More roads, more vehicles’-

Bager said some other strategies to stop the carnage on Brazil’s roads have failed.

Signage warning motorists to watch out for crossing animals has little impact, he told AFP, leading to an average speed reduction of just three percent.

There are also so-called wildlife bridges and tunnels intended to move animals safely from one side of the road to the other, and fences to keep them contained – all insufficient to address the scale of the problem, Bager said.

In 2014, he and other ecologists created an app called Urubu, to which thousands of users contributed information, helping to identify hotspots of road fatalities.

The project helped raise public awareness and even inspired a bill on safe animal crossing and dispersal, which is awaiting a vote in Congress.

The app was shut down last year due to a lack of funding, but Bager plans to reactivate it.

“We have more and more roads, more vehicles and some roadkill that will probably continue to grow,” he said.

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