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Diseases originating from wildlife pose a significant threat to global health, causing human and economic losses each year. The transmission of disease from animals to humans occurs at the interface between humans, livestock, and wildlife…

This paper introduces a new, highly consequential setting for the use of computer vision for environmental sustainability. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) (aka intensive livestock farms or "factory farms") produce significant…

Global environment monitoring is a task that requires additional attention in the contemporary rapid climate change environment. This includes monitoring the rate of deforestation and areas affected by flooding. Satellite imaging has…

As infamous invaders to the North American ecosystem, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) is devastating not only to native bee colonies, but also to local apiculture. One of the most effective way to combat the harmful species is to…

Recognizing individual animals over time is central to many ecological and conservation questions, including estimating abundance, survival, movement, and social structure. Recent advances in automated identification from images and even…

Photographs of wild animals in their natural habitats can be recorded unobtrusively via cameras that are triggered by motion nearby. The installation of such camera traps is becoming increasingly common across the world. Although this is a…

Aerial wildlife tracking is critical for conservation efforts and relies on detecting small objects on the ground below the aircraft. It presents technical challenges: crewed aircraft are expensive, risky and disruptive; autonomous drones…

Effective monitoring of wildlife is critical for assessing biodiversity and ecosystem health, as declines in key species often signal significant environmental changes. Birds, particularly ground-nesting species, serve as important…

Electric utilities are struggling to manage increasing wildfire risk in a hotter and drier climate. Utility transmission and distribution lines regularly ignite destructive fires when they make contact with surrounding vegetation. Trimming…

Biodiversity conservation depends on accurate, up-to-date information about wildlife population distributions. Motion-activated cameras, also known as camera traps, are a critical tool for population surveys, as they are cheap and…

It is well known that excessive harvesting or hunting has driven species to extinction both on local and global scales. This leads to one of the fundamental problems of conservation ecology: how should we harvest a population so that…

Traditional animal identification methods such as ear-tagging, ear notching, and branding have been effective but pose risks to the animal and have scalability issues. Electrical methods offer better tracking and monitoring but require…

The combination of high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning have proven useful in many sustainability-related tasks, including poverty prediction, infrastructure measurement, and forest monitoring. However, the accuracy…

The invasive spotted lanternfly (SLF) poses a significant threat to agriculture and ecosystems, causing widespread damage. Current control methods, such as egg scraping, pesticides, and quarantines, prove labor-intensive, environmentally…

The establishment of protected areas or parks has become an important tool for wildlife conservation. However, frequent occurrences of human-wildlife conflict at the edges of these parks can undermine their conservation goals. Many African…

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) pose serious risks to air, water, and public health, but have proven to be challenging to regulate. The U.S. Government Accountability Office notes that a basic challenge is the lack of…

Ethnicity is a key demographic attribute of human beings and it plays a vital role in automatic facial recognition and have extensive real world applications such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI); demographic based classification;…

Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, impacting ecosystem services necessary to ensure food, water, and human health and well-being. Understanding the distribution of species and their habitats is crucial for conservation…

Insects represent half of all global biodiversity, yet many of the world's insects are disappearing, with severe implications for ecosystems and agriculture. Despite this crisis, data on insect diversity and abundance remain woefully…

African agriculture is undergoing rapid transformation. Annual maps of crop fields are key to understanding the nature of this transformation, but such maps are currently lacking and must be developed using advanced machine learning models…