Zoë Jewell had a problem.
She had stumbled upon a better way to track the black rhinos she and her colleague were monitoring in Zimbabwe, but there wasn’t an easy way to scale the solution.
Jewell and her partner discovered that the Indigenous guides they’d hired to locate the endangered animals could study a rhino’s tracks and learn details about the creature’s sex, often its age, and even what plants it had been eating.
The trackers’ expertise proved superior to radio collars, which required that the rhinos be regularly immobilized so researchers could make adjustments. That process reduced female rhinos’ fertility — the last thing Jewell, a veterinarian, wanted.
But the observational skills expert trackers wielded took years to develop. So Jewell, a cofounder of the US nonprofit WildTrack, turned to artificial intelligence to help identify animal tracks using photos.
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