In the desert plains of Northern Kenya, hundreds of people from around the world and different walks of life have gathered. The photographs they take with their GPS-enabled cameras might be humanity's best shot at saving an entire species. This is the story of Wildbook, an artificial intelligence (AI) software program that creates a live database to track animal populations. In this episode of Teamistry, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite discovers how a shared mission, and a shared technology platform supporting the work of diverse teams, is saving animals – and the biodiversity of the planet. We hear from Tanya Berger-Wolf, co-founder of Wildbook and Jason Holmberg, co-founder of WildMe, the organization that created and runs Wildbook. We also hear from Rosemary Warungu, zebra project manager at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, and Daniel Rubenstein, a behavioural ecologist at Princeton University, as they explain how Wildbook's global community is helping change local attitudes towards the Grevy's zebra — one photo at a time. Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.
We're on the arid desert plains of northern Kenya.
It's a sunny January weekend, and a team of hundreds of people have gathered to take part in a global operation.
They come from all over data scientists, local government officials, wildlife biologists, tourists and even school kids.
All with a common goal to photograph and count zebras.
Small teams of three or four pile into Land Rovers, cameras at the ready.
For three days, they spread out over the 15,000 sq mi of wilderness, doing their best to photograph as many zebras as they can.
It's called the great Grevy's rally.
The Grevy zebra is a tall spirit with big ears and beautiful narrow stripes.
It looks like a living work of art and it is perilously close to extinction.
Glavis and blasts are endangered.
The reasons why they are endangered is because of the foliage and water competition with the livestock.
The other reason is over hunting for their beautiful skin and also hunting for meat.
That's Rosemary Wurangu.
She's a zebra project manager at the Oompala Research center in Kenya.
She's explaining how local farmers see the zebras as pests competition for their livestock's food and water.
Faced with threats to its habitat from poaching and farming, the population of Grevy's zebras has declined to somewhere around 2000, from a high of 15,000 just a few decades ago.
But that's just a guess.
How many are there really?
Without a clear number, it's difficult to know where to concentrate the efforts to save them, and whether those efforts are even working at all.
That's where the rally comes in.