Boîte à outils numériques

Large land and ocean mammals, like elephants and whales, play essential roles in the environment but are severely threatened by human activities. Images taken from planes can be used to spot these animals from the air. However, these species are difficult to observe because they are rare and move a lot, so unfortunately there are not many images collected from planes that contain these species. Fortunately, however, people share many photos and videos of large animals on social networks because these animals are attractive. These images have been used by researchers to train a computer program to recognize an endangered ocean mammal: the dugong. The program found up to 79% of the dugongs present in images collected by a plane flying around the main island of New Caledonia, which is in the Pacific Ocean.