2026-02-27
21 分钟For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Peer Lewis in for Rachel Feldman.
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.