Wildlife, around the world, faces mounting existential crises: habitat destruction, climate change, and the threat of extinction. Technology is now an important part in efforts to tackle these enormous problems. Among these newest solutions are some innovative projects from the nonprofit San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
In 2023, the organization launched AI-enabled surveillance technology to monitor the health of wildlife in remote and not-easily-accessible regions. It also worked alongside partners to clone highly endangered species, increasing the genetic diversity necessary for their survival.
Ideating and creating novel solutions that protect animals and ecosystems worldwide has earned San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance a place on Fast Company’s list of the world’s Most Innovative Companies for 2024. Here, the Alliance chief conservation and wildlife health officer, Nadine Lamberski, and VP of wildlife conservation science, Megan Owen, share their thoughts about their organization’s culture of innovation.
1. How do you use technology to help address threats to wildlife, ecosystems, and biodiversity?
Owen: One example is a system we developed called SageBRUSH. It integrates AI with visual, acoustic, and other types of sensors to monitor habitats. Paired with our Cougarvision software application, SageBRUSH can automatically identify species, allowing us to more quickly process millions of captured images. What took months, we can now do in weeks.
Lamberski: During a severe drought in Kenya, we noticed through remote sensing, that elephants released into the Sarah Wildlife Conservancy were suffering. Their body conditions were declining, and it became necessary for us, with our partners, to intervene. We were able to supplement the elephants’ food until the rains came many months later.
2. How has technology helped overcome the challenges of supporting wildlife in remote areas?
Owen: We’ve been working with our partners to monitor polar bears’ den-emergence behavior in Svalbard, a high-Arctic island at 78 degrees north latitude. We had to develop a camera system that can withstand intense cold, operate in mountainous terrain, and be sensitive enough to identify a white bear against a white background. We’ve also used drones equipped with thermal sensors to better identify the exact location of dens.
Developing tools like these for complex, real-world applications requires a lot of research and development, but we can’t be tinkering too long in the lab. We’re not an academic research institution— we’re a conservation organization.
3. How are you leveraging new scientific advancements to protect wildlife?
Lamberski: Dr. Kurt Benirschke founded our Frozen Zoo, a collection of more than 11,000 living cell cultures and other biological samples, on the belief that you should preserve things for reasons you don’t know yet. The Frozen Zoo is now one of six collections in the Alliance’s Wildlife Biodiversity Bank. Fifty years later, we’re fortunate that genomic sequencing has become so fast and inexpensive, and we have a wealth of information in the bank. We’re just beginning to tap into its true potential.
Material from the Frozen Zoo helped with the recent cloning of endangered Przewalski horses and black-footed ferrets. The cloning introduced otherwise lost biodiversity back into those species, and it never would have happened without the foresight to collect those samples in the 1980s. These living cell lines have been waiting for science to catch up.