Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
Wildlife ecologists and IT experts at the Australian Wildlife Conservancy have put their heads together to develop cutting-edge technology that may allow native animals to come and go from fenced reserves as they please, while keeping feral predators at bay.
The first tests of “SmartGate” were done on woylies, or brush-tailed bettongs. Tamar wallabies weren’t so cooperative.
The “SmartGate” is a double-gated enclosed tunnel with an integrated artificial intelligence program that acts like a wildlife ‘bouncer,’ inspecting the animal as it enters the tunnel before allowing it to pass through, or not.
A prototype of the SmartGate has been trialled since September at Australian Wildlife Conservancy’s (AWC) Karakamia Wildlife Sanctuary on Noongar Country in southwest Western Australia.
Karakamia is one of many feral predator-free fenced area in Australia that protects threatened wildlife from predation by introduced cats and foxes – the main driver of native mammal extinctions and ongoing declines in Australia.
Dr Bryony Palmer, a wildlife ecologist with AWC and lead on the SmartGate project, told Cosmos that fenced areas are the only properly effective way of protecting a lot of Australia’s threatened mammals from cats and foxes.
The SmartGate could make them even more effective.
“There are some limitations with fenced areas, of course, because we’re restricting the movement of the animals inside and outside,” says Palmer.
“Having a species-specific gate … that is absolutely reliable, that we can be 100% sure won’t let a cat or fox into the fenced area, could let our threatened species or all other native species that are present at the site come and go as they need to.”
The potential applications are wide-ranging, such as allowing animals agile enough to climb over and out of a predator-proof fenced areas to re-enter it. It could also be used release species which become overabundant in the reserve.
“We’ve got one species, the tammar wallaby, which can tend to become quite abundant, because inside our fenced areas, they don’t really have any predators,” says Palmer.
“We’ve been thinking about ways in which we can then manage that population so that we don’t have too many inside.”
The SmartGate was designed specifically to help manage these macropod populations by allowing them to leave fenced areas, while keeping predators out and other native species safely inside.
Woylie jumps in SmartGate during trial at Karakamia Wildlife Sanctuary. Credit: © Australian Wildlife Conservancy
As an animal approaches the SmartGate it easily traverses the open outer gate and triggers the motion detection in the centre of the tunnel, which activates a video camera and the AI processor.
“The AI program assesses each frame in the video, and it looks to see whether the target species is present or not,” says Palmer.
“Not only does the target species have to be present. It has to be just one of them.”
“We’ve built that in because we want to make sure if we have an animal with a young at heel … that they weren’t being let through,” says Palmer.
The AI processor used in the SmartGate was adapted from the AWC’s AI Species Classifier Model, which was initially developed to help process images taken by AWC’s remote camera traps. According to AWC, it can identify images of up to 120 native wildlife and invasive species and has assisted in accurately classifying more than 55 million images.
“We’ve been building off that for this SmartGate project. It’s required a different set of training images, because the camera in the gate is set up quite differently to the way we set up our monitoring cameras,” says Palmer.
“It’s looking at the animals from slightly above and really close up, compared to other monitoring cameras which are sort of face on and a bit further away.”
To make this training dataset, the team created a dummy gate and captured photographs of curious animals checking out the bait with the SmartGate’s camera and camera angle.
“As we implemented the field trials with the actual working gate, we also kept feeding all of those images back into the processor to keep refining it,” says Palmer.
The SmartGate was installed in a fenced pen within Karakamia’s 286-hectare feral predator-free fenced area. Only woylies (Bettongia penicillata ogilbyi) were allowed passage through.
The field trial saw 25 successful and safe woylie transits over 17 active nights.
“Where we’ve had multiple animals or non-target species enter the gate, the AI program has correctly recognised that that’s a ‘not allowed’ combination of animals, and hasn’t triggered,” says Palmer.
But Palmer says that they are still very much in the testing and prototype phase of the project. “It will be a little while before we have a fully working, fully implementable model,” she says.
“The reason why we’ve been using woylies is that they’re quite an abundant species here at Karakamia, and they are quite interested in checking out bait. So we were able to get lots of images for them quite quickly.
“Whereas we tried for a while to get images of the tamar wallabies, and they were much slower and less frequent at going into our little prototype gate. We weren’t getting enough images of them to like quickly enough for us to be able to implement the field trials when we wanted to. So, we switched species for that.
“Eventually we’ll also gather enough images of the tammars that we’ll be able to use [the SmartGate] for that species as well.”
The next step will be to trial the technology on an external fence at Karakamia, before testing the prototype at another of AWC’s predator-proof fenced sanctuaries.
