Watatunga Hosts AI & Conservation Summit with Google Experts

On the 16th of November, Watatunga hosted an extraordinary meeting of worlds – an opportunity for wildlife experts from across Norfolk to share their expertise with an international group of researchers and software engineers working on Biodiversity at Google.

Bringing together 25 of the world’s leading experts leveraging AI for a transformative impact on Sustainability with those working hands on to protect wildlife, we discussed the latest developments in AI-powered ecological monitoring, bioacoustics, remote sensing, and decision support with the aim of making lasting connections to inform each other’s work.

Among the Norfolk based experts were representatives from Holkham, Wild Ken Hill, Nattergal, the British Trust of Ornithology, the North Norfolk Coastal Group and the University of East Anglia, while the Google side included delegates from their international offices, temporarily in the U.K. for a Google sustainability summit that brought their international teams together.

Founder Ed Pope said, “The reserve was at its best – crisp autumn colours, all three male bongo out on show, a stunning sighting of our white-lipped deer in the woodland, their stag silhouetted by the lake.  We made it back from tour to the Watatunga stretch-tent just before the heavens opened for a fascinating presentation from several of the Google delegates.”

Drew Purves from Google DeepMind introduced us to some of the fundamentals of the current AI revolution before members of the Google team took us through the various ways that the AI revolution can be applied to conservation — from monitoring species via ‘bioacoustics’ (microphones deployed in the field) and wildlife cameras, to satellite-based remote sensing of habitat change, to integrating diverse documents and data sets to guide conservation action and contribute to local and global biodiversity targets.

Among many of those presenting on new initiatives, we also had a historic overview of Google’s role in supporting emergent climate change technologies from Rachel Payne, Managing Director at X, the Moonshot factory for Google who now leads on many of their current climate initiatives and has been working in this field with Google over several decades.

We also heard from Millie Chapman, a visiting researcher at Google and professor at ETH Zurich, whose work looks at the intersection of ecology, data science and decision-making.  It was fascinating to contemplate how power dynamics, transparency, and biases of data and algorithms might influence decision making about land and sea protection, and to have a glimpse of the challenges around equity in this space.

In these and other areas, the power of AI is increasing very rapidly. This led to a great discussion with our local conservation practitioners, many of whom were already using some AI-powered tools such as Merlin and iNaturalist. An emerging topic from the discussion was how to blend the best of AI, with the deep local natural history knowledge we are lucky enough to have here in Norfolk. How can we all work together to make sure AI empowers decision makers at every level to do the best they can for nature?

Drew Purves who facilitated the meeting from Google said, “Everyone really was quite amazed by the tour experience. Please bear in mind that this group has an enormous amount of experience in nature, and of eco-tourism.  With no exceptions, we were all really impressed and excited to see what you are doing at Watatunga. Similarly, people really valued meeting some people from the local conservation community. I personally felt a sense of pride to see Norfolk represented in that way.”

It was a truly stimulating afternoon, from which we hope will come useful connections for Norfolk and for the Google delegates looking to test nascent technologies or ideas with those working hands-on in the field. Reaction to the event from the Norfolk side was perhaps best summed up by one of our attendees, “Frankly I was amazed to find myself in your stretch tent on a soggy west Norfolk afternoon learning from the best in the business about how AI is going to transform data management and decision making across our sector hopefully to greatly beneficial effect.”

If you are interested in hosting a corporate event at our award winning wildlife reserve, we have a variety of one of a kind corporate spaces. Host your corporate offsite in our premium, sustainably built wooden chalet, uniquely curated as a mini natural history museum, or immerse your team in nature with our fully accessible, luxury stretch tent. For more information, please visit here.