GoKawiilPeering out at California’s San Gabriel Mountains through the windows of my cabin, I can still recall the massive wildfire that incinerated more than 40,000 hectares of Angeles National Forest in 2020. As colossal columns of smoke rose above the ridge line, newsreaders reported that no homes had been destroyed and that the blaze had not caused any injuries. That was blatantly untrue.
Countless forest residents — from rabbits and squirrels to coyotes (Canis latrans) and pumas (Puma concolor) — were killed or maimed in the megafire, and the areas they once called home were reduced to ash. However, it seemed that these casualties didn’t count, because only places where humans live were deemed inhabited. By contrast, the millions of animal species we share the planet with — what naturalist Henry Beston called the “other nations” of our world in his book The Outermost House (1928) — are too often dismissed as living brief and transitory lives in the supposedly uninhabited wilderness.
AI is helping to decode animals’ speech. Will it also let us talk with them?
This distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is proving increasingly difficult to defend. Fresh insights into the deep relationships that animals have with the land, air and sea are emerging from ambitious studies that combine GPS data, precise satellite imagery and artificial-intelligence systems.
As well as tracking animal movements, these technologies are revealing the relationships, resources, conflict zones, knowledge hubs, borders and landmarks that give all creatures a ‘sense of place’. Such knowledge can empower wildlife-conservation efforts. Ultimately, these advances could enable humanity to “listen to the animals and hear what they have to say”, notes Jewlya Samaniego, an ethnobotanist at the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing Native Plant Nursery in Agoura Hills, California. GPS tracking data of pumas and other animals have helped to demonstrate the need to build Samaniego’s ‘vegetated bridge’, which will be the largest wildlife crossing on Earth when it opens in December.
Here are more ways technology is rewriting humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Fire hose of data
A generation ago, a zoologist would have been delighted to receive a location signal from a GPS tracker once a day. Now, an ultralight tag on a mammal or bird can broadcast its location every second. Moreover, 3D maps of such data are revealing sophisticated and often surprising behavioural patterns.
For example, after years of fieldwork, behavioural ecologist Meg Crofoot and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, concluded that kinkajous (Potos flavus) in the Panamanian rainforest return to the same fruit trees for food every day, suggesting that these trees must be key landmarks on the arboreal animals’ cognitive map. But modern tags have revealed much more: the kinkajous also seem to travel across the forest by walking along the exact same branches — a network of well-established aerial trails runs through the treetops.
This finding raises another question: how do they move so deliberately? Crofoot’s current theory is that the kinkajous might scent-mark their preferred trails like ants do, transforming the forest into a lattice of invisible viaducts.
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