Tracking wild tiger skins
The Turing test
Founded in 1984 in the United Kingdom, the EIA investigates and campaigns against environmental crime and abuse, including working with other groups in exposing the trade of body parts from so-called tiger parks in South-east Asia in 2020.
It is now partnering with The Alan Turing Institute, a leading centre for data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a new AI tool to contribute to law enforcement efforts by creating an extensive database of tiger stripe patterns.
The new tiger stripe database project was formally launched on International Tiger Day on July 29.
According to the Alan Turing Institute website, the programme will see the placement of PHD data science researchers within 10 environmental organisations, including EIA, to work on their data challenges.
EIA is now calling on citizen scientists, photographers and others to submit their images of tigers.
The group, according to Banks, already has a database of hundreds of images of tiger skins – including rugs, taxidermy specimens and carcasses – which it has documented from online sales and in persistent trade hubs as well as collated from open-source images of seized tigers.
“The initial objective,” she says, “is to develop an accessible, user-friendly AI tool that helps us in future cross reference and match the stripe patterns of tiger skins we see for sale – digitally and physically – and those that are seized against an existing EIA database of images ... including (those of ) captive tigers held in facilities suspected to be leaking tiger skins and other body parts into the illegal trade.”
If there’s a match, Banks elaborates, it will help EIA determine whether it and other researchers who submit trade research images are seeing the same skins being offered apparently in different places or by different people, which might then throw up some interesting leads for further investigation.
“Or indeed, filter out traders that appear to be recycling images of the same skin,” she adds.
Similarly, a match between a skin seized in one country and that seen for sale in another or in a captive facility in yet another third country can help prompt law enforcement cooperation among the respective wildlife authorities.
EIA’S ultimate ambition, according to Banks, is to eventually create a reference database that could be hosted by a neutral inter-governmental agency which law enforcement and researchers can access.
“We need lots of images of known individual tigers to develop, train and test the new technology; hence, the request to photographers to assist.
“Photographers have a second option to allow us to retain those images for the purposes of building up the reference database,” she says.
The local situation
Will the existence of such a database benefit the Malayan tiger, whose main, and by far biggest, threat is poachers?
As at July this year – which is, coincidentally, the Year of the Tiger – 43 poachers have so far been arrested in joint operations among several enforcement agencies in efforts to save the Malayan tiger, according to the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (Perhilitan) in a social media post on July 28. Forfeitures of wildlife parts worth nearly Rm4mil were also made between 2019 and July this year.
When it comes to poaching, while the locals tend to focus on hunting small prey such as the kijang and wild boar, those going for the big game like tigers tend to be foreigners targeting the lucrative illegal wildlife trade to China and Vietnam.
Wildlife Conservation Society Malaysia Programme country director Dr Mark Rayan Darmaraj says the use of such databases with AI – like the one EIA is hoping to develop – can certainly be one of the many useful tools to be used in the efforts to save the Malayan tiger from going extinct in the wild, where there are an estimated 150 animals only left.
This is because a key step in the
investigation of illegal wildlife shipments is not just about ascertaining routes but also determining if the specimen has been taken from the wild and if so, where.
“Pinpointing locations or the area from where the animals were taken from the wild greatly aids in building the picture of the illegal wildlife trade network – from the poacher to the middleman to the trader,” explains Darmaraj, who has been involved in the study and conservation of the Malayan tiger for decades.
Currently, Malayan tigers in the wild are identified via their stripes through camera trapping surveys mounted by Perhilitan in collaboration with other conservation groups, as well as DNA analysis of their droppings or scat.
“However, scat is notoriously difficult to find on the forest floor in our humid climate conditions. They deteriorate very fast,” states Darmaraj.
Building a Malaysian database
Also notoriously difficult to find in Peninsular Malaysia’s dense forests is the King of the Jungle itself, as even the most dedicated tiger scientist would testify.
This means that except for footage and pictures from camera traps and those of Malayan tigers in zoos, any image of the animals in the wild, which makes them vulnerable to poaching, is surely hard to come by.
This is in contrast to wild tigers in India or Nepal, where the jungles are less dense, or countries like the United States, where there are now an estimated 10,000 of the animals being kept in captivity, increasingly in private collections.
“I think this (database) is a commendable initiative and certainly doable for captive tigers but ambitious for wild tigers,” admits Darmaraj.
“Nevertheless, I would say it is certainly worth the effort to contribute, provided that there are no restrictions in sharing these images.
“This database may not be the only method to pinpoint the origins of wild tiger skins but can certainly be another tool that can be of aid to law enforcement authorities.
“Again, of course, this can be done with ease in captivity and may seem impossible to think of for wild tigers.
“However, with more camera trapping surveys being carried out in our forests, it may not necessarily be far-fetched as more images are obtained of wild tigers over the long run from exercises such as wide-scale national tiger surveys,” says Darmaraj.
All images for the EIA’S project can be submitted with the relevant information via a form on its website at eia-international.org.