Real-Time Wildlife Monitoring

Globally, conflicts between people and wildlife are rising due to population growth, shifting land use patterns and climate change. In Romania, mountain communities are impacted by bears and wild boars, which damage livestock, crops and property. These conflicts can undermine conservation efforts and may result in the killing of problematic animals. This research introduces an AI-based alert system to reduce human-wildlife conflicts in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains.

In collaboration with Fundația Conservation Carpathia, this project supports Rapid Intervention Teams who respond to wildlife activity in mountain villages. Six years of camera trap data are used to train and test AI models to detect and classify European mammals. These models are integrated into an alert system and deployed in three locations. The new pipeline improves state-of-the-art methods for detecting and classifying bears and wild boars. Preliminary results from the field deployment show a positive impact on conservation efforts. This is the first known study to use remote processing of 4G-enabled camera trap images to operate a human-wildlife conflict alert system. Moreover, it is also the first known study to design and evaluate all stages of an AI-based wildlife alert system, from data collection and model training to field deployment and conservation impact.