How machine learning could help save threatened species from extinction

There are thousands of species on Earth that we still don’t know much about — but we now know that they are already teetering on the edge of extinction. A new study used machine learning to figure out just how threatened these lesser-known species are, and the results were grim.

Some species of animals and plants are labeled “data deficient” because conservationists haven’t been able to gather enough information about them to understand how they live or how many of them are left. It turns out that those “data deficient” species are unfortunately even more threatened than other species that are more well known (to scientists, at least). The data from this study came from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which...

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