The epitaph "'Butch' Weldy" concludes the "Minerva" series. Butch declaims about his ordeal after a work related accident—with nary a nod to Minerva.

Conservation researchers will go to great lengths to survey birds—getting up before dawn, driving hours on back roads, undertaking grueling hikes—all for only a brief snapshot of which species or how many individuals are in an area. Such effort is worth it to collect data critical to monitoring and protecting avian populations in important habitats across the world, says Matthew Weldy, Audubon’s senior manager of quantitative science. Strategically placed cameras and audio recorders can extend experts’ reach, but the sheer volume of information these devices produce quickly becomes unmanageable. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing these surveys—rapidly. Scientists are turning to the technology to draw insights from months of sound clips in a forest, for example, or weeks of images from a remote island. “It’s not just sifting through data; it’s getting to answers pretty quickly,” says Tom Denton, a software engineer turned research scientist who developed Perch, one of a number of predictive AI models that researchers use to analyze avian sounds. Today wildlife biologists are increasingly employing AI to address conservation challenges across vast areas and ask novel research questions. “It’s a transformative thing for the field,” says Weldy. In a time of swift biodiversity loss, habitat degradation, and climate...

Amazon.com: C.S. Lewis (New Casebooks, 60): 9780230301252: Abate, Michelle Ann, Weldy, Lance: Books