Brazil hopes to use AI to save wild animals from death on the road April 23, 2024

Around 475 million vertebrates die on Brazilian roads every year (TERCIO TEIXEIRA)

By AFP - Agence France Presse

Brazil hopes to use AI to save wild animals from death on the road

In Brazil, where around 16 wild animals are killed on the roads every second, a computer scientist has found a futuristic solution to this everyday problem: He is using AI to alert motorists to their presence.

Direct attacks on the South American country's extensive road network are the biggest threat to numerous animal species, which are forced to live in ever closer proximity to humans.

According to the Brazilian Center for Road Ecology (CBEE), around 475 million vertebrates die on the roads every year - mostly smaller species such as capybaras, armadillos, and opossums.

"This is the biggest direct impact on wildlife in Brazil," CBEE coordinator Alex Bager told AFP.

Computer science student Gabriel Souto Ferrante was shocked by the slaughter in the world's most biodiverse country and immediately sprang into action.

The 25-year-old began by identifying the five medium and large animal species most frequently killed in road accidents: the puma, the giant anteater, the tapir, the maned wolf, and the jaguarundi, a species of wild cat.

Souto, who is pursuing a master's degree at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), then created a database with thousands of images of these animals and trained an AI model to recognize them in real-time.

Numerous tests followed, which were successful, as the results of his efforts recently published in the journal Scientific Reports show.

Souto collaborated with the USP Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science.

For the project to become a reality, Souto said the scientists would need "support from the companies that manage the roads," including access to traffic cameras and "edge computing" devices - hardware that can relay a real-time warning to drivers, as some navigation applications do.

Road concession companies would also have to do their bit "to remove or capture the animal", he told AFP.

It is hoped that the technology will also save lives by reducing wildlife accidents.

- 'More roads, more vehicles'

Bager said several other strategies to curb the carnage on Brazilian roads had failed.

Signs warning drivers to watch out for crossing animals had little impact, he told AFP, as they only led to an average speed reduction of three percent.

There are also so-called animal bridges and tunnels to get the animals safely from one side of the road to the other, as well as fences to confine them - all inadequate to deal with the scale of the problem, Badger said.

In 2014, he and other ecologists developed an app called Urubu, to which thousands of users contributed information and which made it possible to identify hotspots for roadkill.

The project helped raise public awareness and even inspired a bill on the safe crossing and movement of animals, which is due to be voted on in Congress.

Lack of funding caused the app to be discontinued last year, but Bager is determined to reactivate it.

"We have more and more roads, more vehicles, and the number of animals being run over will probably continue to rise," he said.

Lucía LACURCIA

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