Researches spark debate after using drones to help animals: 'Are we actually harming the environment that we're trying to help?'

Yahoo

26-05-2025

As more and more wildlife species lose their habitats and fall under significant threat of extinction, researchers have begun using artificial intelligence to help track, analyze, predict, and understand the situation at hand, as detailed by The Verge.
Conservation researcher Alexandre Delplanque, for instance, uses AI to identify and count the waterbirds his drone encounters in order to monitor the various species. Likewise, scientists recently used AI to scan footage and identified over 300 new insect species in Panama.
Unfortunately, AI tools can be imperfect and biased, as The Verge explained, and the environmental detriment of powering AI may defeat the purpose of its benefits in field research.
AI data centers, for one, rely on copious amounts of water to function. In addition, the prevalence of AI-based technology puts pressure on power plants to supply enough electricity to sustain rising demand, typically through the burning of dirty fuels.
The dirty fuels that frequently power them generate air pollution — including fine particulate matter and nitrous oxide, which have been linked to a myriad of health concerns, from organ damage to cognitive decline — and contribute to our planet's overheated condition, which threatens our communities and fragile ecosystems.
Carbon pollution is the primary source of rising global temperatures and the risks that come with them, including more intense weather phenomena and crop insecurities.
So while using AI to monitor threatened species might serve to protect them in future conservation endeavors, the question arises if the involvement of AI may be simultaneously damaging natural habitats and putting these species at further risk.
Even the training process for an AI model can prove environmentally taxing.
A 2022 study estimated that in training alone, a large language model consumed almost 1,300 megawatt hours of electricity — about as much as 130 households use on average in a whole year, per The Verge.
Fortunately, though, the electronic footprint of AI in the environmental field is marginal compared to the rampant use of AI models elsewhere, according to The Verge. A growing number of data centers are also beginning to adopt non-polluting, renewable energy.
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Researchers hope that, since it seems AI is here to stay, their applications of these tools can still make a difference for the better.
"We have this concern as scientists all the time: are we actually harming the environment that we're trying to help?" said Canadian ecology professor Laura Pollock. "At least for the cases we're talking about, I don't think so, because the models we're running aren't huge … not like Social Network Big Data."
AI-based technologies are already in action in the conservation field, analyzing hours upon hours of live drone footage to detect different species. Awareness is key — if we can observe and track these populations, we can target our conservation efforts more economically should the need arise.
Some, like computational ecologist Tanya Berger-Wolf, believe the conservationists are just beginning to tap into the power of AI.
"We want to go beyond scaling and speeding up what people already do to something new, like generating testable hypotheses or extracting unseen patterns and combinations," Berger-Wolf told The Verge.
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