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Conservationists turn to AI in battle to save red squirrels

The tech is being used to automatically control the creatures' access to feeders at sites across the UK.

Ian Glendinning, from Northern Red Squirrels - one of the conservation groups involved in the trial - told the BBC that, for the animals he is trying to protect, help from technology was urgently needed. The detection process is time-consuming for human observers - but Squirrel Agent uses the power of AI to rapidly analyse all those markers and decide with an extremely high level of accuracy which is which. For example, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) used the tech to analyse millions of photographs of a large area of Australia wiped out by bushfires, in order to find places where animals had survived.

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