Autonomous Gliders Feeding Artificial Intelligence Could Help Save the Whales, Researchers Say
By pairing information on detected whales with environmental conditions, it's possible to guess where they'll be at any given time.
Researchers from Rutgers University are looking to help save the whales — with the application of a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool, designed to figure out where whales might be based on prevailing environmental conditions.
"With this program, we’re correlating the position of a whale in the ocean with environmental conditions," Josh Kohut, project co-lead, explains of the team's work. "This allows us to become much more informed on decision making about where the whales might be. We can predict the time and location that represents a higher probability for whales to be around. This will enable us to implement different mitigation strategies to protect them."
The team's work was inspired by the idea of indirectly tracking the location of people in a house by analyzing the environment itself: if there's food in the kitchen or a TV on in the living room, there's a good chance the house's occupants are there too. By building a machine learning model, trained on data gathered by autonomous underwater gliders and orbital satellites since 1992, the team has created a system that can predict where endangered whales might be at any given time — and where they might go next.
In conjunction with live data from the gliders, which gather data including water temperature, salinity, current strength, chlorophyll levels, as well as actively reading the size of schools of fish and recording whale calls, the system could help protect whale populations from human activity, the team claims.
"These tools are valuable and would solidly benefit anyone engaged in the blue economy – including fishing, shipping, and developing alternative forms of energy sustainably," corresponding author Ahmed Aziz Ezzat explains. "This approach can support a wise and environmentally responsible use of these waters so that we achieve our economic objectives, and at the same time make sure that we cause minimal to no harm to the environmental habitat of these creatures."
"We've had the data but, until now, we've not been able to put the two sets – those detections of where the whales are, and what the environment is like at those places – together," Kohut adds. "This is a demonstration of the power of employing AI methodologies to advance our ability to predict or estimate where these whales are."
The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.