By the time New York Climate Week wrapped up in September this year, Robin Whytock had a point to make. Over the course of the summit, the ecologist was part of many conversations where scientists and researchers spoke to him about the difficulty in conducting biodiversity surveys. So when Whytock headed to Central Park on a Saturday morning, he had a mission: demonstrate how technology could help count squirrels in the sprawling park, and compare his results with that of a manual survey done by 300 people in 2018. Over the course of a few hours, walking around with a cup of coffee, Whytock determined that there were 2,979 squirrels living in the park. The result of the 2018 survey, published eight months after it was carried out: 2,373. “If I can come up with an estimate of the squirrel population in a morning that’s in the ballpark of what was done by a hugely intensive survey with 300 people, let’s think of what’s possible in terms of the scalability of technology,” Whytock, CEO and founder of AI-powered nature monitoring platform Okala, told Mongabay in a video interview. With his organization, Whytock is now attempting to scale up tech solutions to make biodiversity monitoring easier and more efficient. While sensors are getting cheaper and are more widely available now, Whytock said, the real challenge lies beyond the tech hardware. “People put all of their budget into data collection and buying sensors, but don’t know how they’re going to analyze the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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