Engineering in the Native Forest

Part 1 in a 2 part series about Artificial Intelligence and New Zealand native birds.

We’ve all heard that sound, and it is glorious. Native birds singing in pristine native forest.


Then tragedy happens. It could be an introduced pest like possums or rats. Maybe the climate changes and the native birds cannot adapt. Maybe it’s just a really really really bad year for bird flu.

The once vibrant healthy forest falls quiet. The native bird population is in crisis.

Meanwhile, over on social media:

I think it’s awesome when people are passionate about their local environment. I think it’s amazing when folks break out of their comfort zone and try to bring about positive change.

We all know that blindly doing the first thing that pops into your head is rarely the best course of action. Even with the best of intentions, when it comes to the environment, there’s just far too many ways to make the situation worse.

Fortunately, we can use Engineering!

• First, we measure the health of an ecosystem.
  
  
• Next, we apply an intervention:
  
  • pest trapping
  • a breeding program
  • fences
  • [Your idea here]
• Then, we measure the health of the ecosystem a second time.

Mix in a little bit of math, and now we can figure out which interventions are the most effective.

Those interventions which are more (cost) effective? We'll do more of those.

The interventions which have no effect, or worse, are damaging? Well, let's not do that again!

Simple right?

Well how do we measure ecosystem health?

Right now, in New Zealand, the gold standard is a manual process. Listeners walk out into the forest, and for five minutes, makes a record of all the birds they can hear on a piece of paper. Those pieces of paper are all brought together and another person manually enters all that data into a computer.

What if there was a way to estimate ecosystem health directly from an audio stream instead? Then we could leave recorders out in the forest, and monitor them remotely. More data, more timely, more consistency.

I'm good with computers and signal processing and things, maybe I can help...

Find out more over on the 2040 blog, or read Part 2