Astro-Ecology

Astro-ecology

Saving endangered animals with science from the stars

Do you want to help save endangered animals using drones? Of course you do!
Now tell us, how many spider monkeys are there in this tree?

Sadly even with a drone its not always easy to find the animals we're looking for.
Have another go with this thermal infrared image instead!

(There are 9 monkeys - they are the bright yellow blobs.)

With a thermal camera we can see animals really easily thanks to their body heat. And in the thermal data animals glow in the same way that stars and galaxies glow. So we can use astronomy techniques to find them automatically. Astro-ecology is a world first collaboration between astronomers and conservation ecologists to help monitor and protect endangered animals.

In infrared images animals (rhinos on the left) glow in a similar way to objects in space (cluster of galaxies on the right).

We're developing a system that can find the animals, and also poachers, and can tell the difference between different species of animals based on their unique thermal fingerprint. This system will run onboard the thermal drone and will allow us to find and catch poachers in real time, and gain a very accurate understanding of vulnerable animal species so that conservationists can figure out the best way to protect them.

So far we think our system is OK at finding the animals but it needs some training to be able to tell them apart. Some objects that are obvious to the human eye are not so obvious to the computer. We need your help to make sure that we are detecting all the animals in our data and that our algorithms can identify different species correctly.

This is our algorithm identifying for chimps at Chester Zoo.

Here we're flying above the rhinos and lechwe (antelope) at Knowsley Safari.

We've had success with our drones and animal identification systems at Knowsley Safari and Chester Zoo. Now we want to train our algorithm with animals in the wild.