These AI devices protect nature in real time | Juan M. Lavista Ferres

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. The work of conservationists across the globe is vital, but also painstakingly slow. Too slow compared to the rate of climate change. In this talk, AI visionary Juan M. Lavista-Ferres, who leads Microsoft's AI for Good Lab, introduces a new technology that is transforming how conservationists work and shares how it can dramatically increase our ability to care for this planet's vital ecosystems. Let me introduce you to Andrés Rojas. A couple of weeks, Andrés hikes deep in the Colombian rainforest, passing through mud and swamps of mosquitos. Not for adventure, definitely not for fun, but to do his job. He needs to replace batteries and change memory cards of camera traps and biogustic devices. This is the critical infrastructure of conservation science today. People like Andrés are heroes, and thanks to their effort, they have saved species from the brink of extinction. The 200,000 conservationists in the world, and all of them share one thing in common. To do their job, they need data. But we live in an interesting world where we have refrigerators that can text you if you're running out of milk. Conservationists still need to hike for days just to see if an animal passed by. Conservation today is heroic, it's needed, but it's painfully slow. Last year, I was proudly presenting at a biodiversity conference, some of our latest air models, but it was in fact a very humbling moment. Because when presenting to them, I realized that even though they were using our models, once you understood the hassle that they needed to go through from installing these devices to collecting the data to eventually have time to analyze it, I realized that our solutions were not making such a big difference. I realized that in order for us to make a difference, we need to completely reinvent how data works in biodiversity. This is why we develop SPARO. SPARO stands for Solar Power Acoustic Remote Recording Observation Watch. SPARO is a small network of devices that act as a hub in the middle of nature, connecting to camera traps, acoustic devices, sensors, processing the information using solar power, processing the information on the edge using a low-voltage GPU, sending results back using a low-orbit satellite. With SPARO, you install it once, you no longer need to hike to collect data, you can connect online and see the data real-time. One of my biggest lessons in life is the realization that we as humans are addicted to complexity. We like complex projects and we like complex things. This is the reason we put a person on the moon before we add wheels to your luggage. Don't get me wrong. If you want to impress people, your solutions can be complex. If you want to have an impact in the world, if you want people to use your solutions, your solutions need to be simple. Building simple solutions is hard, but it's certainly worth the effort. This is why our most important principle designing SPARO is to keep it simple. Simple to develop, simple to deploy, simple to assemble. SPARO is open source. Anyone from conservation scientists to researchers to park rangers can use it and improve upon it. You don't buy SPARO. You buy off-the-shelf components and you assemble it together. If you have the ability to assemble your own IKEA furniture, and I know that's not for everybody, you're ready to assemble SPARO. Even if simple, SPARO is actually quite powerful. Camera traps is a technology that was created four decades ago. They have a sensor and any time that they see movement, they take a picture. Some of that movement is caused by animals. Majority of that movement is caused by wind or something else that moved. This is a big hazard for conservationists, because in order for them to get just a few pictures of the species they care, they need to review thousands of pictures, costing them hundreds of hours of their time. SPARO solves this problem. With SPARO, we have AI models that can automatically classify and identify the animals in them. But SPARO goes further. SPARO not only can find a giraffe, SPARO can find that giraffe. Animals like giraffes have a unique pattern, and that unique pattern doesn't change over time. You can use these to re-identify, it's like a fingerprint. You can use to re-identify that particular giraffe. Animal re-identification is critical for conservation, because it allows them to understand things like survival or even measure population. SPARO can automatically do this. And thanks to our collaboration with the Wild Nature Institute, we have this model running in SPARO today. Well a picture might be worth a thousand worlds. If we only focus on pictures, we might be missing the forest for the trees. But if you listen, the story is different. SPARO has the ability to isolate and classify sounds. Here for example, there's a frog. That's a cicada. That's a macaw. Thanks to SPARO, through sound, we can measure the true health of a forest. Finding an animal from a picture is not difficult. Identifying from sound requires very deep expertise. People like Paula Caicedo from Fundación Viva de Versa Colombia has these expertise. In every expedition, she collects 600 hours worth of sounds, and then she listens to every one of these hours. This is like binge-watching the whole complete eight seasons of Game of Thrones ten times just to get a few samples of the animal she cares. SPARO can help people like Paula. Paula can train SPARO to focus on a particular animal or a particular call so she can save hundreds of hours of her time so she can focus on what she does best, having a better understanding and helping protect the animal she loves. Because SPARO is connected online, SPARO can actually send alerts. Wildfires are a major global threat costing lives, billions in infrastructure, and the complete destruction of some of the most important biodiversity ecosystems. In a wildfire, every minute counts. Detect it early, and you can stop it with a shovel. But if you wait, you will need bulldozers, air tankers, and sometimes a miracle. SPARO has the ability to do early detection of fire and send alerts to authorities. With SPARO, we're not only collecting data, we can act on that data, and that data can help save lives. By the end of 2025, we will have SPARO running in all continents. SPARO will change the way biodiversity data works. Today, conservation moves at the speed of data, and when a conservationist install a device to the time it takes for that data to eventually get analyzed today, it takes months, sometimes a year. With SPARO, we want to move from months to days. For some species, this delta can be the difference between survival and extinction. I dedicate this talk to the conservationists out there who have dedicated and even sacrificed their lives to help protect biodiversity in this planet. They might not wear capes, but make absolutely no mistake. They are superheroes, yet they need our help. Our job, our responsibility, and our commitment today is that we will provide them with the best tools we can, so they have a fighting chance. Thank you. That was Juan M. Lavista-Ferez at the TED Countdown Summit Nairobi, in Kenya, in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com/curationguidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnevong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizi Bogan, additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Elise Hu, I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.