Just chiming in to try to answer the following question:
On the point about AI-enabled modelling of wild animal welfare and implications of different interventions: are there any existing promising examples of this?
I don’t think I’ve found any slam-dunk examples where currently available tools are used to predict *outcomes* of conservation interventions / population management decisions.
However, I think there are lots of opportunities to learn from past efforts with the help of AI, and inform decisions around population management using AI, seen from the lens of conservation biology at least (where research in conservation biology is likely indirectly helpful for understanding wild animal welfare as well). See for example van Houtan et al. (2020), Sathishkumar et al. (2023), van Oosterhout (2023), Wu et al. (2023), and Agmata & Guðmundsson (2025). Even if AI wasn’t specifically and explicitly used to predict the outcomes of population management decisions (I think it is very likely that we will be able to use AI for that eventually), you may still reap benefits from simply being able to more accurately target the right place at the right time.
Just chiming in to try to answer the following question:
I don’t think I’ve found any slam-dunk examples where currently available tools are used to predict *outcomes* of conservation interventions / population management decisions.
However, I think there are lots of opportunities to learn from past efforts with the help of AI, and inform decisions around population management using AI, seen from the lens of conservation biology at least (where research in conservation biology is likely indirectly helpful for understanding wild animal welfare as well). See for example van Houtan et al. (2020), Sathishkumar et al. (2023), van Oosterhout (2023), Wu et al. (2023), and Agmata & Guðmundsson (2025). Even if AI wasn’t specifically and explicitly used to predict the outcomes of population management decisions (I think it is very likely that we will be able to use AI for that eventually), you may still reap benefits from simply being able to more accurately target the right place at the right time.
In terms of examples of the use of AI that seems directly relevant for wild animal welfare, see the following papers (Bierlich et al. 2024, Rast et al. 2024, and Murphy et al. 2025).