The University of Bristol, the Mammal Society, Rainforest Connection and Huawei are collaborating to help save the endangered squirrel in the UK.
The project involves monitoring UK woodlands with red, with grey and with joint squirrel populations. The red and the grey squirrel don’t live together very happily.
It’s estimated that the red cohort has lost 60 percent of its range over the last 13 years. There are redoubts where red squirrels still have reasonable populations – the Wild Life Trusts believe there are 140,000 red squirrels and 2.5 million grey squirrels. But it believes that the red species may become extinct in 10 years.
The project will use artificial intelligence, bio-acoustic and cloud tech with Huawei software analysing sounds in the environment.
Dr. Stephanie Wray, chair of the Mammal Society said: “We face an urgent crisis in protecting some of the UK’s best-loved native species, and there is no creature more iconic than the red squirrel. This technology allows us to see what’s happening in real time, and the AI approach allows one researcher to cover a much wider area that we would traditionally. This means we can scale the project up faster, and start to make a difference for endangered species sooner.”
Apparently, grey squirrels can pass on a virus to the reds that ends in death. When I was a kid in the 1950s there was a bounty on grey squirrels’ tails.
