There are about 532 197 flamingos on the northern basin of Sua Pan, the eastern pan in the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana.
Image: Pexels / Ingrid Dietrich
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It’s a lot of birds to count by hand – probably way too many. So that’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in handy.
Scientists from the University of New South Wales Sydney’s Centre for Ecosystem Science have used AI to accurately count the birds using aerial photographs collected in June 2019, making future surveying of numbers of this species and potentially other bird and mammal species – much easier.
Citizen Scientist Mike Holding made the project possible, with the help of others, by rigging up a Cessna aeroplane and flying it systematically across the pans at a height of 500-600 m and speed of 175- 195 km/h, taking 3 715 photos.
It was a tricky business, given turbulence, but importantly, the machine learning was just as good as a small sample of photographs counted manually by one of the researchers who pored over the flamingo dots, counting each one.
The aim of the project is conservation, of course, as the Makgadikgadi Pans and Nxai Pan National Park and their flamingos are an important bird area, for lesser flamingos especially, which are Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List.
‘We need to protect the flooding regime by making sure water from the Nata River in the north and other rivers to the Makgadikgadi Pans, such as the Boteti River, are maintained,’ said Professor Richard Kingsford, one of the authors of the study.
This article, written by Lorraine Kearney, was originally published in a print issue of Getaway Magazine. Find us on shelves for more!
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