Washington State Magazine
AI Scans the Wild in Days, Not Months, and Pullman Helped Build It
Wildlife cameras catch everything, a lynx slipping through a creek bed, a bear scratching a tree, a herd of elk moving at dusk. Then somebody has to sort through the thousands of photos. That used to take months. Now it takes days, and Pullman helped build the tool that made it happen.
WSU researchers trained artificial intelligence to scan trail-camera images and identify species in a fraction of the time. That is not a small efficiency gain. It is the difference between a biologist getting a report before the snow melts or after the grant runs out. Faster data means faster decisions about habitat, migration, and fire recovery. The kind of work that actually keeps wild places wild.
This is the same kind of applied thinking that shows up in our other coverage, like the Coug researchers betting AI can crack the snowpack riddle for Northwest farms. That story digs into how machine learning is taking on a multibillion-dollar question for agriculture. Same instinct. Different problem. Both built by people who know what happens when you wait too long for an answer.
Pullman does not always get credit for the tech coming out of it. This one deserves some. A tool that speeds up conservation work by months? That is worth a text to a friend. Go Cougs.
