Britain’s largest ever woodland survey of bats would “simply not have been feasible” without AI, scientists say.
Researchers left devices on poles among the trees of 310 woodlands across Britain, recording 98 million bat calls over three years, which would have taken more than 30 years to analyse without AI.
Some of Britain’s rarest and most threatened bats, including the red-listed Barbastelle, have been recorded in the south-west of England, including Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.
Kate Jones, from University College London, said: “AI has fundamentally changed the scale at which we can monitor wildlife.” She added the survey was a “nice story of AI for good”.
