Level: Intermediate
Zoe Jewell, President and Co-Founders WildTrack, WildTrack
Sky Alibhai, Director, WildTrack
Frederick Kistner, PhD Student, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Biodiversity is disappearing at around 1000 times natural background rates, due to habitat destruction, human wildlife conflict, illegal trade in endangered species products and climate change. Humanity can not survive without clean air, soil, food, natural resources and medicines that are provided by this complex web of life on earth, so protecting biodiversity must be the absolute priority of global science. Using JMP software, WildTrack has developed a non-invasive and cost-effective solution to the challenge of keeping track of endangered species; the footprint identification technique (FIT). Using a customized cross-validated discriminant analysis with a Ward's clustering method, FIT is able to classify species, individuals, sex and age-class. These data allow WildTrack to collect vital data on numbers and distribution of endangered species. WildTrack has now started to explore the potential of UAVs (drones) to augment data collection, and computer vision techniques to assist in filtering and classifying the increased volumes of data being collected. Another method of augmenting data utilization is being investigated by Frederick Kistner at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), using the imputation of missing values in JMP as a tool to enable a greater proportion of footprint images to be useful in monitoring these populations.
