Context: Researchers from the University of Oxford Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and Machine Learning Research Group detected elephants in South Africa from space using Artificial Intelligence.

• Very high-resolution satellite imagery is being used to count and detect wildlife species with an accuracy that they have compared to human detection capabilities.

Significance of counting

• The population of African elephants has dropped over the last century due to poaching, retaliatory killing from crop-raiding and habitat fragmentation.
• Therefore, it is important to track elephant populations for their conservation.
• Inaccurate counts can lead to misallocation of conservation resources.

How did scientists track the elephants?

• The most common survey methods to keep a check on elephant involved aerial counts undertaken from manned aircraft.
• This method does not deliver accurate results since observers on aircraft are prone to get exhausted, are sometimes hindered by poor visibility and may even succumb to bias.
• Aerial surveys are costly and logistically challenging.
• To test the new method, they used satellite imagery that required no ground presence to monitor the elephants.
• Researchers used the highest resolution satellite imagery currently available, called Worldview3.
• The team created a training dataset of 1,000 elephants and compared the results to human performance.
• In 2002, scientists started using geographic information systems (GIS) technology to understand how they could conserve Asian elephants.
• At the time, scientists launched the first satellite-tracking project on Asian elephants in Myanmar.

About Geographic Information System (GIS)

• A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a framework for gathering, managing, and analysing data.
• It integrates many types of data.
• It analyses spatial location and organizes layers of information into visualizations using maps and 3D scenes. ?
• With this unique capability, GIS reveals deeper insights into data, such as patterns, relationships, and situations—helping users make smarter decisions.