Guardians of the Green: A Review of AI, ML, and IoT Innovations Against Illegal Deforestation and Wildlife Poaching

The pressing environmental challenges of our time include illegal deforestation and poaching of wildlife, which contribute to the degradation of ecosystems and biodiversity and exacerbate climate change. These activities, often carried out in the remote, inaccessible places where traditional law enforcement is already stretched thin, are now being countered by innovative technologies of the digital revolution: the Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Earth Observation (EO) communities are providing novel solutions. In short, these local Earth scientists are enabling the real-time detection of environmental crimes, with automated alerts that are now going to local law enforcement in an effort to nip in the bud what amounts to crimes against humanity. This paper encompasses and brings together a large and diverse array of interdisciplinary studies and field applications that use AI, ML, and the IoT to safeguard forests and wildlife. Case studies comprised within low-power acoustic monitoring networks, drone-based surveillance with embedded intelligence, and smart camera traps that recognize species and deter poachers. Challenges these systems face, in common, include: how to overcome difficulty in collecting and labeling the data they generate, to scale up from pilot projects into comprehensive solutions, to provide power and bandwidth that meet the demands of their most basic functions, and to get all these people and critters rights issues worked out in a way that doesn’t result in going to jail. Yes, these smart systems can and will operate at scales and in ways that put privacy rights in danger. These challenges are handled successfully, or not, by the case studies included in this review.