Artificial intelligence makes a splash in efforts to protect Alaska’s ice seals and beluga whales
When Erin Moreland set out to become a research zoologist, she envisioned days spent sitting on cliffs, drawing seals and other animals to record their lives for efforts to understand their activities and protect their habitats.
Instead, Moreland found herself stuck in front of a computer screen, clicking through thousands of aerial photographs of sea ice as she scanned for signs of life in Alaskan waters. It took her team so long to sort through each survey — akin to looking for lone grains of rice on vast mounds of sand — that the information was outdated by the time it was published.
“There’s got to be a better way to do this,” she recalls thinking. “Scientists should be freed up to contribute more to the study of animals and better understand what challenges they might be facing. Having to do something this time-consuming holds them back from what they could be accomplishing.”
That better way is now here — an idea that began, unusually enough, with the view from Moreland’s Seattle office window and her fortuitous summons to jury duty. She and her fellow National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists now will use artificial intelligence this spring to help monitor endangered beluga whales, threatened ice seals, polar bears and more, shaving years off the time it takes to get data into the right hands to protect the animals.
The teams are training AI tools to distinguish a seal from a rock and a whale’s whistle from a dredging machine’s squeak as they seek to understand the marine mammals’ behavior and help them survive amid melting ice and increasing human activity.
Moreland’s project combines AI technology with improved cameras on a NOAA turboprop airplane that will fly over the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska this April and May, scanning and classifying the imagery to produce a population count of ice seals and polar bears that will be ready in hours instead of months. Her colleague Manuel Castellote, a NOAA affiliate scientist, will apply a similar algorithm to the recordings he’ll pick up from equipment scattered across the bottom of Alaska’s Cook Inlet, helping him quickly decipher how the shrinking population of endangered belugas spent its winter.
The data will be confirmed by scientists, analyzed by statisticians and then reported to people such as Jon Kurland, NOAA’s assistant regional administrator for protected resources in Alaska.
When Erin Moreland set out to become a research zoologist, she envisioned days spent sitting on cliffs, drawing seals and other animals to record their lives for efforts to understand their activities and protect their habitats.
Instead, Moreland found herself stuck in front of a computer screen, clicking through thousands of aerial photographs of sea ice as she scanned for signs of life in Alaskan waters. It took her team so long to sort through each survey — akin to looking for lone grains of rice on vast mounds of sand — that the information was outdated by the time it was published.
“There’s got to be a better way to do this,” she recalls thinking. “Scientists should be freed up to contribute more to the study of animals and better understand what challenges they might be facing. Having to do something this time-consuming holds them back from what they could be accomplishing.”
That better way is now here — an idea that began, unusually enough, with the view from Moreland’s Seattle office window and her fortuitous summons to jury duty. She and her fellow National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists now will use artificial intelligence this spring to help monitor endangered beluga whales, threatened ice seals, polar bears and more, shaving years off the time it takes to get data into the right hands to protect the animals.
The teams are training AI tools to distinguish a seal from a rock and a whale’s whistle from a dredging machine’s squeak as they seek to understand the marine mammals’ behavior and help them survive amid melting ice and increasing human activity.
Moreland’s project combines AI technology with improved cameras on a NOAA turboprop airplane that will fly over the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska this April and May, scanning and classifying the imagery to produce a population count of ice seals and polar bears that will be ready in hours instead of months. Her colleague Manuel Castellote, a NOAA affiliate scientist, will apply a similar algorithm to the recordings he’ll pick up from equipment scattered across the bottom of Alaska’s Cook Inlet, helping him quickly decipher how the shrinking population of endangered belugas spent its winter.
The data will be confirmed by scientists, analyzed by statisticians and then reported to people such as Jon Kurland, NOAA’s assistant regional administrator for protected resources in Alaska.