Tech4Nature Mexico

A public interest project is a project or initiative that aims to benefit the public or a specific community by addressing a pressing social or environmental problem. These projects typically prioritize the public good over individual or private interests, and often involve collaboration among a variety of stakeholders, including governments, civil society organizations, businesses, and community groups. The Tech4Nature Mexico project is a public interest initiative because it aims to use artificial intelligence sytems to protect and natural ecosystems, which is a crucial component of addressing the global climate crisis. Natural ecosystems, such as forests, wetlands, and oceans, provide a range of important ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, water regulation, and biodiversity conservation, which are essential for human well-being. By using AI to support biodiversity monitoring and protection, the Tech4Nature project can contribute to mitigating the impacts of climate change, reducing biodiversity loss, and enhancing the resilience of communities that depend on these priority species and ecosystems for their livelihoods.

Internal in our organization

The goal of the Tech4Nature Mexico project in relation to the public interest is to accelerate the effective conservation and regeneration of biodiversity and ecosystem health in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeastern Mexico, which is home to a rich natural and cultural heritage safeguarded by indigenous peoples and local communities. The project is leveraging machine learning and data from eco-acoustic and camera-trap image monitoring to strengthen the monitoring, conservation, and understanding of the effects of climate change on ecosystems and priority species, including threatened species such as the jaguar and spider monkey.

Unesco - Recommendation on the ethics of AI, OECD - Principles on AI

A local community and human rights-based approach

All the activities are implemented in strong collaboration with the local ecosystem workgroup made up of the local government, leading academic institutions, and local leaders. A human rights and ethical approach to the use of technology are a core part of this project.

Commitment with Sustainable Development Goals

This project directly impacts the following Sustainable Development Goals: 13, 14, 15, 2, 6

Inclusion by design

The richness of Yucatan is due in large part to the region's vast cultural heritage. The participation of the communities in decision making and data management is fundamental to the success of this project. It is essential that species sighting alerts, system and water, soil and climate information be transmitted to the community of Dzilam, favoring productive activities such as fishing and tourism. In the community of Dzilam de Bravo, 73% of the population is Mayan-speaking, and traditional ecological knowledge is part of the conservation success of this area. For this reason, local actors are an important part part of all the project lifecycle, from design, to deployment, and data interpretation, ensuring bottom to top inclusive and ethical strategies of technology used, based on their principles.

Replicalibity and scalability

We seek to create a replicable model to be used in similar mangrove areas in other countries based on the results and methodology report.

Policy impact

The collaboration with the government and the actions resulting from the analysis of the data are contributing to the design and deployment of environmental policies, as well as to the standardization of monitoring and management processes for priority ecosystems and species.

Civil society, Public administration, Academic researcher, Industry partners

Workshops, Co-creation process

No

No

5

Monthly meetings with all the partners, as well as direct communication channels.

Effectiveness: Testing using sample images. The data was partitioned into 3 sets: training, validation and testing. Accuracy, recall, precision and F1 metrics were calculated. The most relevant metric is F1 which describes how effective the algorithm is in detecting a jaguar in the image.

Data sheets

User control (consent, update, retract)

Mexico is considered a megadiverse country, as it is home to around 12% of the world's species. It ranks third in the world in mammal diversity and second in reptile diversity, and is home to a rich natural and cultural heritage safeguarded by indigenous peoples and local communities. It is estimated that the country is home to more than 100,000 species of plants, fungi and animals; however, according to Mexican legislation, more than 2,600 species (including amphibians, birds, fungi, invertebrates, mammals, fish, plants and reptiles) are classified under some category of risk. The Yucatan Peninsula, located in southeastern Mexico, has a great diversity of ecosystems ranging from tropical rainforests to coral reefs, petenes, mangroves, dunes, cenotes and ojos de agua, coastal lagoons, caves and subway rivers, among others. Nationally, the peninsula has 54% of Mexico's mangroves and the largest continuous rainforest. However, all of these ecosystems are undergoing rapid deterioration due to human activities and climate change, with nearly 80% of the rainforests disturbed and only 22% of their territorial extension covered by mature vegetation, mainly concentrated in natural protected areas. To accelerate the effective conservation and regeneration of biodiversity and ecosystem health, the multi sector initiative, Tech4Nature Mexico, was born to strengthen the monitoring, conservation and understanding of the effects of climate change on ecosystems and priority species. This includes threatened species such as the jaguar, spider monkey and other species in a protected area in the coastal zone of southeastern Mexico. This is done through machine learning, data from eco-acoustic and camera-trap image monitoring. Moreover, this initiative harnesses the power and potential of multisector collaborations and community centered approaches to untap the biodiversity conservation protection of a key area of Latin America.

Directly

The Dzilam State Reserve is a key area to pilot the use of technology for its conservation and effective management. Its 18,979.55 hectares of mangroves lay ground for fertile replicable interventions to showcase the power of technology to support science-based decision-making for conservation and restoration action as well as the subsequent monitoring of these actions to ensure the transparency of the results and their success in general. Furthermore, the Yucatan Peninsula supports the most important jaguar population in the country. Because of this, this region is considered a Priority I Jaguar Conservation Area.

We rely partly on open data and publish datasets on wildlife monitoring to train our algorithms.