For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pierre-Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman.

Wildlife poaching is a serious issue in many parts of the world. One way of monitoring

poaching activity is to put recorders in the forest to listen for gunshots. Computer

programs that use AI can help detect the crack of a gun. But accuracy is still a huge challenge

when the forest is such a noisy

place. Freelance writer Melissa Hobson met someone who may have experienced a breakthrough,

a 17-year-old high schooler who built an AI model that can accurately pick out gunshots from

other jungle sounds. What impact could this model make on gun-based poaching? Here's Melissa

with more about how it might help

save elephants and other animals from the threat of illegal hunting. That is the sound of an

African forest elephant. To the untrained ear, it might be indistinguishable from noises made by the

animal's relative, the African savanna elephant.

Both species are under threat, but while African savanna elephants are endangered,

forest elephants are critically endangered.

They're also highly elusive, living in dense tropical rainforests in central Africa

and parts of West Africa, they're very hard to find and study.

As such, we don't know much about the forest elephants, and it's very difficult to

exactly know how many there still are.

That's Daniela Hedwig, director of the Elephant Listening Project at the K-Lisa Yang

Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University.

Our goal is to use acoustic monitoring to contribute to the conservation of the Central African

Rainforest. We have about almost 100 acoustic units spread out in the area, covering almost

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