Animalies

Animalies in action.

Pitch

While animals tracking systems get better and better, thousands of animals still get poached every year. Animalies is our solution to keep animals safe by combining experts knowledge and machine learning to reveal poaching incidents hidden in tracking data anomalies.

Inspiration

In the last decade, 9442 african rhinos have been lost to poaching. Illegal wildlife trafficking is indeed the fourth most lucrative illegal industry. This trade worth actually tens of billion US dollar annually. While we truly need regular data to prevent these devastating practices, only a few countries collect and keep detailed data on poaching. And treatment and analysis of these data is tricky...

What it does

Animalies is a tool that combines expert knowledge about animals behavior and machine learning techniques to analyze GPS data and detect poaching. It aims to support reserves and parks managers in the task of animals monitoring.

Challenges we ran into

Data available usually concern a single individual and not multiple animals in the herd
Data about poaching are complex to obtain.
The analysis of data is specific to each species, thus expert knowledge is required to detect anomalies in the data.

What we learned

We learned a lot about animal behavior and how complicated it is analyze their movement. However, we were able to find techniques that seem to work pretty well!

What's next for Animalies

Using the data collected annotated via the expert knowledge, we want to apply machine learning techniques to create a model that can detect poaching occurring on live data. These live data could come from satellite image analyzed to retrieve the animals positions.