Our lives are made up of transactions, almost everything has value. But what value can we give to protecting biodiversity, i.e. nature – from whose intelligence we benefit? How can it be conveyed and understood that there is more money to be made by preserving ecosystems than by destroying them? For some time now, science has been concerned with calculating the value of the annual services that ecosystems provide to our society. Artificial intelligence helps in many ways.
Numerous examples demonstrate how AI can help in observing and recording animals: for example, when it comes to wild animals in confusing terrain, at night or in dense vegetation, as well as in the open sea. Or when counting elephants in one place and the course of their migration movements. Double counting when migrating cranes is avoided. The beautiful and shy beluga whales can be better identified and individually analyzed thanks to an AI called “You Only Look Once”.
Although the transitions between individual sections are not always smooth, we can feel that this is a human-made book and not an AI-generated one. The comprehensible explanations about theory and practical implementation as well as the presentation of various research models are enriched with graphics, photos and information boxes, for example about the liver fluke, animal seismographs or valuable manganese nodules.
Frauke Fischer and Hilke Oberhansberg urgently point out one problem: that AI requires a large amount of natural, sometimes rare, resources. So how do we protect nature with AI when its use and application consumes so much energy that biodiversity is lost? The authors provide ideas and optimization options and do not hide the fact that they have not eaten the protective wisdom with leaves.
Review: Alexander Schramm
Frauke Fischer, Hilke Oberhansberg
Can AI save nature?
oekom Verlag, 216 pages, € 26.–
ISBN 978-3-98726-163-3