I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. The planet is losing biodiversity at an alarming rate, and we don't have a clear picture of how quickly iconic species are disappearing. The problem is a dearth of data to effectively track these animals, but the advances in AI for identifying and recognizing images are changing things.

Computational ecologist Tanya Berger-Wolf shares this promising advance in her talk at TEDx Ohio State University from 2016.

In 2014, I met Sudan, the last male northern white rhino in the world. Just four years later,

Sudan died, leaving two both female northern white rhinos alive. The species are effectively extinct,

and they're not the only ones. We're losing

biodiversity at an unprecedented scale. We're in the middle of what is termed the six mass

extinction, a biodiversity crisis, and we don't even have the scientific and technological

solution to keep up knowing

what we're losing and how fast. The International Unit for Conservation of Nature, Red List,

is the official international organization that keeps track of the biodiversity of the world

and of the 130,000 species that they track out of the biodiversity of the world and of the 130,000 species that they track,

out of the millions that are out there, majority have their conservation status as data

deficient or their population trend as unknown.

And these are iconic species, like killer whales and polar bears.

We don't know how well they're doing.

We can't make policy decisions.

We can't put the right resources to protect them.

How many African elephants are there?

How fast are they lost to poaching?

How far do the whales go?

And how many juvenile turtles survive to adulthood?

We don't know.

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