1. What is the environmental challenge that you’re addressing through your studentship, and what do you hope to achieve?

Biodiversity loss – I am hoping to bring promote evidence-based conservation by developing new statistical methods for population monitoring that combine multiple data sources, with the aim of reducing uncertainty and bias in population estimates. To this end, I am monitoring the western chimpanzee as a critically endangered case study species, with fieldwork and applied conservation impact in Cantanhez National Park (CNP), Guinea-Bissau in collaboration with the Institute of Biodiversity and Protected Areas of Guinea-Bissau (IBAP).

2. What methods and approach are you using to carry out your research? 

For my data collection I am using a variety of cutting-edge conservation technologies such as bioacoustics recorders, camera traps, and satellite remote sensing, alongside conventional surveys methods such as line transects. For bioacoustics data processing, I am harnessing deep learning / AI methods including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and large audio-language foundation models. Finally, for data analysis I am developing Bayesian spatial point process models for data integration and the prediction of population abundance, density, occupancy and spatio-temporal distribution.

3. How exactly are you using AI / data science in your research?  Could you do it without AI?

Artificial intelligence will play a critical role in processing the large bioacoustics dataset I collected during my fieldwork which totals 10TB or 30,000 hours of audio. AI models will hopefully allow me to automatically detect chimpanzee calls in this massive dataset, which would be completely infeasible for a human researcher to do manually.

4. What stage of the project are you at?  What’s been done and what’s to come? 

I am starting my second year of the three year research component of my Phd. So far I am nearing completion of the Bayesian modelling framework for several of the datasets I am using (line-transect nest observations, bioacoustics and camera trap occupancy). I have also successfully conducted 4-months of fieldwork and collected 30,000 hours of audio across CNP, fostering local research connections with our collaborators. I am now starting work on the AI models to process the bioacoustics dataset. Once this is done, I will be able to extract the bioacoustic detection data (presence-absence) and build the full integrated Bayesian model that combines all of them. The final stage will be publishing the research as papers and communicating the findings back to our local collaborators and stakeholders through translated conservation reports to ensure applied conservation impact.

5. Highlights of the project so far? (Anything that strikes you and that gets you excited – e.g. time in Guinea Bissau, other fieldtrips, conferences & papers, connections with others / other experiences etc…?)

Kicking off the first year of my PhD, I published my MSc research project in Ecography which my PhD research builds upon. Since then, I have had the opportunity to attend three major conferences in both bioacoustics and statistics, including the world ecoacoustics congress in Madrid and the International statistical ecology conference in Swansea. Perhaps the biggest highlight is my fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau. This experience gave me a lifetime of memories and gave me invaluable insight into the reality of conservation on the ground. As a researcher now heavily focused on statistics, AI and methods, it is easy to become disconnected from the actual needs of conservation and what is the latest greatest paper you can publish. My fieldwork recalibrated my research focus and interests, something which is essential if you also wish to work at the interface between conservation and statistics.

6. Interdisciplinary working:  How are you finding working across disciplines?  What are those disciplines / connections?  Any particular challenges or opportunities you’ve come across?

As a researcher, I largely work across three disciplines, statistics, ecology, and conservation. As a discipline, science and practise, conservation in particular is highly diverse in the approaches needed as well as the stakeholders involved. For example, conservation research regularly involves human and social science, ecology, anthropology, politics, medicine, geography, mathematics and the list goes on. As a result, I think conservation research and particularly statistical ecology, is often very disconnected from applied conservation on the ground. Far too often I see papers emerge or see myself working on a problem and ask myself, how will this actually make a difference?

As mentioned, my fieldwork has been tremendously valuable in calibrating me as a researcher to the needs of conservation stakeholders, our local collaborators, and just generally making me think twice before pursuing a research paper in the latest flashy topic that might get citations, rather than pursuing a more specific research problem that would benefit our collaborators. I also work in an highly interdisciplinary research group called the Cantanhez Chimpanzee Project, led by two of my supervisors (Dr Kimberley Hockings and Dr Hellen Bersacola). This has been invaluable for ensuring my work is truly interdisciplinary and will eventually (hopefully) have real work impact in our research site in Guinea-Bissau. This team includes local researchers from Guinea-Bissau and tackles a range of research disciplines including social sciences, statistics, anthropology, conservation biology, behavioural ecology and artificial intelligence. Being able to work in such a team allows me to gain valuable insights and advice from different research perspectives to the same conservation problem.

7. Personal stories like why you are into this / what inspires you to do this / what your hopes are for the outcomes?

From a young age I have been both curious about the natural world and enjoyed problem solving. This is largely what drew me to science and eventually an undergraduate degree in Biology. As an undergrad, I was broadly interest in ecology and the environment, but I remember a pivotal lecture was I when learning about the scale of the biodiversity and climate crises where I realised that I wanted to do something about it. During this same time I was lucky enough to go on field trips in Scotland, Portugal and then Tanzania cementing my passion for conservation and ultimately leading me to pursue a Masters in Conservation and Biodiversity. Since then, my interest in problem solving has taken a front seat and I have become very interested in how statistics and technology can help us to answer critical questions in ecology and conservation. Ultimately, I hope that my research will have real world conservation impact both locally in my research site and further afield.