artificial intelligence

The Sounds Of Coral Reefs | Earth Wise

June 23, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Coral reefs around the world face multiple threats from climate change, pollution, and other impacts of human activity. Reef conservation and restoration projects must be able to monitor the health of reefs and that is not such a simple matter. Surveying reefs generally is labor-intensive and time consuming. But in a new study, scientists at the University of Exeter in the UK have found a new way to do it.

The fish and other creatures living on coral reefs produce a vast range of sounds. The meaning of these various sounds is for the most part unknown, but reefs nonetheless have distinctive sonic signatures.

The Exeter researchers decided to make use of machine learning technology. They trained a computer algorithm using multiple recordings of both healthy and degraded coral reefs. This essentially taught the computer to learn the difference between them. A computer can pick up patterns that are undetectable to the human year. This application of artificial intelligence can tell us faster and more accurately how a reef is doing.

The computer was then used to analyze a set of new recordings, and successfully identified reef health 92% of the time. The team then was able to use this technique to track the progress of reef restoration efforts.

It is generally much cheaper and easier to deploy an underwater hydrophone on a reef and leave it there instead of having expert divers make repeated visits to a reef to survey its status. Sound recorders and artificial intelligence could be used around the world to monitor the health of coral reefs and determine whether efforts to protect and restore them are working.

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AI learns coral reef “song”

Photo, posted January 11, 2015, courtesy of Falco Ermert via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Helping Corals With Beneficial Bacteria | Earth Wise

March 31, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

A group of researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia is exploring a novel technology to improve the health of corals. Around the globe, corals are being stressed by pathogens, toxins, and warming waters leading to widespread bleaching events.

The new idea is to introduce beneficial bacteria to the corals, thereby boosting the strength and resilience of their symbiotic partners. The concept is akin to the use of probiotics in plant science. Corals rely on bacterial and algal symbionts to provide nutrients, energy (through photosynthesis), toxin regulation, and protection against pathogens.

The researchers selected bacteria that are naturally symbiotic to specific coral species on reefs in the Red Sea, ensuring that no alien bacteria are accidentally introduced. A probiotic cocktail comprising six bacteria strains was used in a laboratory setting. Results in the lab have been promising so far, as they have observed dynamic and metabolic alterations to the corals that boosted their chances of survival under heat stress.

Success in the lab will need to be translated to success in the open oceans, which is challenging. Scaling up and seeding whole reefs might involve robots and artificial intelligence in order to deliver probiotics either into sediments or directly onto corals.

The use of beneficial microorganisms is not the solution to the global destruction of coral reefs. Only worldwide CO₂ mitigation can ultimately accomplish that. But the probiotic approach might buy corals some time as they deal with shifting environmental pressures and try to adapt to a changing world.

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Microbiome boost may help corals resist bleaching

Photo, posted March 18, 2018, courtesy of Steven dos Remedios via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Rising Seas Will Erase Cities

December 18, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

According to new research, climate-driven sea level rise could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought. This sobering assessment means some of the world’s great coastal cities, including Bangkok, Shanghai, Mumbai, Basra, Alexandria, and Ho Chi Minh City, could be in big trouble.

Scientists have always relied on land elevation data to determine the effects of sea level rise over large areas. But standard elevation measurements using satellites struggle to differentiate the true ground level from the tops of trees or buildings. The authors of the paper developed a more accurate way to calculate land elevation by using artificial intelligence to determine the error rate and to correct for it. The new findings revealed that 150 million people – three times more than previously thought – are now living on land that is projected to be below the high-tide line by the middle of this century.

Eight Asian nations – China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan – account for about 70% of the people living on at-risk land.

More than 20 million people in Vietnam, including much of Ho Chi Minh City, live on land that will be inundated by 2050. In Thailand, more than 10% of its citizens, including much of Bangkok, currently live on land imperiled by projected sea level rise.

This new research was produced by Climate Central, a New Jersey-based science organization, and was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

Sea level rise is clearly not just an environmental problem. It’s a humanitarian crisis.

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New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding

Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows

Photo, posted December 18, 2009, courtesy of Misko via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Bioacoustics

December 5, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Researchers are increasingly placing microphones in forests and other ecosystems to monitor birds, insects, frogs, and other animals. Advances in technology are enabling the wide-spread use of bioacoustics as an important research tool.

Studying animals in their natural habitat Is often a difficult task. For one thing, many animals are difficult to find, and the presence of humans disrupts their behavior or even drives them off. Remote cameras are useful, but cameras can only see what is in front of them and aren’t much use for detecting small animals, hidden animals, or ones high up in trees.

Biologists have long recognized the value of recording sound to identify animals and learn about their havior. Animal sounds can be as definitive a means of identification as visual images and microphones can pick up the sounds from animals located anywhere within their detection range.

The two advances in technology that are turning bioacoustics into a widely used tool are a steep drop in the price of recording equipment and the rapidly expanding capabilities of user-friendly artificial intelligence algorithms.

Autonomous environmental audio recorders tended to cost between $500 and $1000 until quite recently. Now, such equipment can be had for as little as $70.

The other big challenge is analyzing audio data. Finding specific animal sounds among hundreds of hours of recordings is an untenably tedious task. Identifying the characteristic sounds of specific species in crowded environments is a tricky business. But neural network-based artificial intelligence technology is making such big data analysis quite practical and, remarkably, it is becoming quite user-friendly.

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Listening to Nature: The Emerging Field of Bioacoustics

Photo, posted January 28, 2013, courtesy of Felix Uribe via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Predicting Lightning Strikes

November 19, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Lightning is one of the most unpredictable phenomena in nature. Approximately 100 lightning bolts strike earth’s surface every second, and each lightning bolt can contain up to one billion volts of electricity. Lightning regularly kills both people and animals and sets homes and forests on fire. It’s also been known to ground airplanes.

Researchers at EPFL – a research institute and university in Switzerland – have developed a novel way to predict where and when lightning will strike. The system relies on a combination of standard data from weather stations and artificial intelligence to predict lightning strikes to the nearest 10 to 30 minutes and within a radius of less than 20 miles. The simple and inexpensive system was outlined in a research paper recently published in Climate and Atmospheric Science, a Nature partner journal.

According to researchers, the current systems for predicting lightning strikes are slow, expensive, and complex, relying on external data acquired by satellite and radar. The new inexpensive system from EPFL uses real time data that can be obtained from any weather station, meaning it can cover remote regions that are out of radar and satellite range and where communication networks are lacking. The quick predictions from the system allow alerts to be issued before a storm has even formed.

The system uses a machine-learning algorithm that’s been trained to recognize conditions that lead to lightning. The researchers took into account atmospheric pressure, air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed, among other things. After training the algorithm, the system was able to predict lightning strikes accurately nearly 80% of the time.

This system is a simple way to predict a complex phenomenon.

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Using AI to predict where and when lightning will strike

Photo, posted December 14, 2018, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Weather-Responsive Traffic Signals

April 17, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

We all spend time sitting at red lights – sometimes it seems like a whole lot of time. There is a fair amount of science applied in the design of traffic signals that at least has the aim of easing congestion and improving traffic safety.

Signals in modern cities are timed using optimization models that analyze multiple factors including traffic volume and speed with the goal of safely getting as many vehicles as possible through intersections. It sure doesn’t seem that way in many places, but that is the intent in any case.

But a real problem with these models is that they assume normal conditions including weather conditions. In places that experience real winter conditions, the assumptions of traffic models fail. If the road surface is covered with snow and ice and visibility is poor, variables like speed and stopping distances become very different.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada collected data from real-world intersections and ran computer simulations to determine the effects of adjusting traffic signal behavior in bad weather (as well as in the presence of other conditions such as accidents or construction.) They found that such adjustments could reduce traffic delays by as much as 20%.

Cities with computerized signal systems are already equipped to remotely and inexpensively adjust the timing of traffic lights. To gain the benefits of smarter signals, there would need to be video cameras and a certain amount of artificial intelligence software that would be able to automatically tweak the timing of lights in response to traffic changes caused by weather, accidents or construction.

It sounds like a great idea.

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Weather-responsive intersections could ease traffic congestion

Photo, posted September 22, 2009, courtesy of Tristan Bowersox via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

New Ocean Energy Technologies

December 26, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The ocean energy sector is still at an early stage of development. Despite the fact that the ocean is permanently in motion, extracting energy from that motion on a major scale continues to be a challenge. But the potential benefits of ocean technologies are compelling enough that many approaches continue to be pursued.