Delafield-based artificial intelligence startup
Synthetaic and its flagship product, the Rapid Automatic Image Detection tool, have helped scientists working for
The Nature Conservancy discover two species of seabird previously thought to be locally extinct.
Arlington County, Virginia-based TNC, a global nonprofit dedicated to conservation efforts in more than 70 countries, was using the RAIC platform to detect seabirds in the Palmyra Atoll, just south of the Hawaiian Islands. RAIC was able to locate a blue noddy and a wedge-tailed shearwater.
Both birds were believed to have been extirpated, or made locally extinct, during World War II. TNC believes this was likely due to disturbances to their habitat and the introduction of predatory, invasive rats.
The nonprofit gathers drone imagery to observe, measure and assess the health of the atoll ecosystem. While using drones minimizes human impact on the environment, it creates terabytes of data that can be difficult for humans to analyze efficiently. Synthetaic’s AI tool analyzes the visual data to return matches for a given image, in this case, birds.
“We would never have found either of those birds looking at the image data on our own,” said Alex Wegmann, TNC’s island resilience lead scientist. “There was too much data, the imagery was too complex, and we were focusing on different bird species. By analyzing our data in RAIC, the information about these birds became accessible in a way it wouldn’t have been otherwise.”
Starting in 2020, The Nature Conservancy and its partners began working to return eight seabird species that are known to the region but not currently found on the atoll.
Earlier this year, the capabilities of the RAIC platform were also put on display as the tool was used to help
track one a Chinese spy balloon that was detected over the U.S.
