AI Facial Recognition Helps Scientists Identify Bears in the Wild

Artificial intelligence is enabling researchers to identify individual bears through facial recognition, offering a new non-invasive way to monitor wildlife and support conservation efforts in the United States.

“The better we can distinguish individual bears, the better we can understand them and their behaviours at the species level,” said Beth Rosenberg, brown bear researcher at Alaska Pacific University.

The system, trained on nearly 73,000 images of 109 Alaskan brown bears collected between 2017 and 2022, analyses stable facial features such as muzzle shape and ear position, correctly identifying known animals at least 70% of the time and helping scientists track populations, study behaviour and reduce the need for stressful tagging or DNA sampling.