Monica Bond and Derek Lee’s “love and obsession” for giraffes started during a trip to Uganda in 2005. Since then, they said, their mission was clear: return to Africa and lead the “world’s greatest giraffe study.” Five years later, the duo co-founded the nonprofit Wild Nature Institute, based in Tanzania, where the Masai giraffe (Giraffa tippelskirchi) is the national animal. Here, their team has focused on identifying individual giraffes based on the unique patterns on their bodies. For years, the team did the work manually, after which they experimented with different iterations of technology. Neither approach yielded the results they were looking for, however. Now, artificial intelligence models — developed in collaboration with Microsoft’s AI For Good Lab — are helping the team speed up their work. Project GIRAFFE (Generalized Image-based Re-identification using AI for Fauna Feature Extraction) is an AI-based, open-source tool that’s helping Bond and Lee efficiently identify and re-identify individual giraffes. “It can now be done in minutes, and we can have the output the same day we collect the data,” Lee told Mongabay in a video interview. Identifying individual giraffes, and being able to subsequently re-identify them, is crucial to understanding the areas that are important for their survival. It’s an urgent task, given how giraffe populations have declined in the last few decades primarily due to habitat loss and poaching. Moreover, protecting giraffe habitats serve a larger purpose for the ecosystem. “Giraffes take up a lot of space themselves,” Lee said. “If you can protect…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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