The project blends data from Planet Labs’ satellites, hidden cameras and acoustic sensors to track the health of the rainforest and the species that live there.Ĭolombian conservationists can use the data from Project Guacamaya to sound the alarm about specific environmental threats. Project Guacamaya (which takes its name from the Mayan word for “macaw”) uses an array of AI models for satellite image analysis, plus AI models that have been adapted from existing Microsoft projects for camera trap analysis and bioacoustics. “We have powerful tools at hand to promote change in society.” “We need to be using technology and innovation to think outside of the box to face the problems that we have,” Diego Ochoa, director of external affairs at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute in Colombia, said in a Microsoft blog posting about the project. Experts documented a 21% increase in the rate of Amazon deforestation in 2022. But those lungs are facing increasing threats from illegal logging and mining. The rainforest is known as the “lungs of the planet,” thanks to its role in global climate regulation. With Project Guacamaya, Microsoft and its partners are addressing a South American issue with global implications: the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest. In the months ahead, the Satlas team hopes to expand its line of geospatial data products to include mapping tools for urban land use, agricultural crop types and land cover. Satlas’ developers have already posted some sample applications - for example, showing how commercial logging has reduced tree cover on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, or how heavily Brazil has invested in solar farms over the past few years. “Over time, we plan to release additional geospatial data products,” Bastani said. The first three data products focus on the positions of offshore wind turbines and platforms, the locations of solar farms and onshore wind turbines, and the percentage of tree canopy coverage for 100-square-meter plots of land. “We have manually labeled 36K wind turbines, 4K solar farms, 7K offshore platforms and 3K tree cover canopy percentages in Sentinel-2 imagery,” AI2 research scientist Fayven Bastani said in a blog post explaining the project. Those features are then displayed on a zoomable online map that can track changes over time. A deep-learning computer model analyzes the images to identify features such as offshore platforms, solar farms and the amount of tree cover in a given area. Satlas starts with images from the European Space Agency’s twin Sentinel-2 satellites. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab is working with public and private institutions in Colombia on Project Guacamaya, which uses AI tools to monitor and understand conditions in the Amazon Rainforest. The Allen Institute for AI, also known as AI2, recently rolled out Satlas, a new software platform for exploring global geospatial data generated from satellite imagery. Geospatial data analysis promises to revolutionize the way agriculture, urban planning and disaster relief is done - and thanks to a variety of projects that make use of artificial intelligence, Microsoft and Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI are part of that revolution. Satlas’ AI modeling software improves satellite image resolution by a factor of four.
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