article / 1 July 2021

BearID Featured: Artificial Intelligence & Other New Technology In Bear Research

Our friends at BearID joined an EXPLORE.org live chat to discuss their work identifying the bears of Katmai National Park with powerful AI technology.  Watch the full panel event below, or here on EXPLORE.org's Youtube Channel. You can also view EXPLORE.org's full interview with the BearID team here.

Watch on EXPLORE.org's Youtube channel.

Viewers around the world have grown to love the bears of EXPLORE.org's popular Katmai National Park Bear Cam, with many of the individual bears even gaining their own fans during fun events like Fat Bear Week.

Watching these bears fish and fatten up via webcam turned out to be a huge source of inspiration for Ed Miller and Mary Nguyen of the BearID team, who tuned in and considered if they may be able to identify individual bears with machine learning technology. Through WILDLABS, the pair of software developers met bear expert and postdoc researcher Melanie Clapham, who happened to be wondering the exact same thing.

Thus, BearID was born, beginning with an experiment utilizing fun smartphone camera filters designed for dogs and growing into a powerful AI tool that uses a deep learning algorithm to recognize specific bears - a difficult task considering how similar many bears look to the human eye! 

Recently featured in the New York Times, BearID's groundbreaking research may become an invaluable tool for monitoring bear populations. And there's even the possibility for expanding it beyond brown bears in America - the BearID team is considering how this tool could be applied to other bear species, and maybe even wolves! 

In the BearID team's recent appearance on the Bear Cam, they discussed how technologies like artificial intelligence can innovate bear data collection and help create non-invasive population monitoring techniques. Learn more about the team's work with the Katmai National Park bears in this panel event, also featuring Joel Cusick, who discusses how LiDAR can measure bear size non-invasively. 

If the Bear Cam has you feeling inspired, stop by the WILDLABS AI for Conservation forum to brainstorm your own ideas for identifying and monitoring wildlife.


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