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Can AI detect hedgehogs from space? Maybe if you find brambles first.


Cambridge researchers use satellite-based bramble detection as a proxy for mapping hedgehog habitats.

Mahler's bramble detector also combines TESSERA earth representation embeddings, which process imagery from the European Space Agency's Sentinel satellites, with ground-truth observations from iNaturalist, a citizen science platform. To find out, Mahler and colleagues Sadiq Jaffer, Anil Madhavapeddy, and Shane Weisz spent a day walking around Cambridge with smartphones and GPS devices, checking whether the model's predictions matched reality. In the future, similar AI-based approaches combining satellite remote sensing with citizen science data could potentially map invasive species, track agricultural pests, or monitor changes in various ecosystems.

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