[birds singing]
- Tatiana: I was always very interested in protecting forests
and I think data science has helped me connect with nature
in different ways.
[gentle music]
My name is Tatiana Maeda.
I am a Brazilian biologist and PhD student,
and I'm studying tropical forests by their sounds.
[birds singing]
It started from my childhood.
I was living in southwest Brazil
and in a region which is called Pantanal.
I guess what here would be a national park,
where you are surrounded by nature
and you're also aware of many different animals around you.
I would take tourists through safaris
to get to know tropical wildlife or Brazilian wildlife,
like jaguars and ocelots and tapirs and giant anteaters.
And through this experience,
I learned how to identify wildlife or animals
by their sounds,
because actually when you are a wildlife guide,
the best way to identify and to find animals
is if you're able to listen to them.
And so I was trained by all the wildlife guides and local people
to identify animal sounds.
But I was interested in understanding
how we can better protect wildlife,
and that's why I decided
to pursue a degree in environmental studies.
So I heard about this lab in Wisconsin
that is monitoring biodiversity through their sound,
and I was very interested about that.
So a healthy forest is also a forest that is quite loud
because there are a lot of animals singing.
And as you disturb the forest with logging, with hunting,
animals may start losing their food and their houses,
and the forest starts to get quieter.
Our lab is trying to monitor how healthy rainforests are
by recording their sounds
and measuring how many animals are there.
We basically set up the recorder and put it on a tree
and just leave the recorder there recording
for a day or months.
The advantage of using this type of recorder
is that it doesn't disturb wildlife.
And then when we get the recorder back,
we can then listen to the recordings
and identify how many animals are singing.
I had thousands of hours of recordings
and I was only able to listen and analyze
about an hour of it.
So for me, it would be impossible
to listen to all these thousands of hours that I had,
and that's where I needed the help of data scientists.
And I met Yuren.
So Yuren's a data scientist,
and she is helping me, building this program
that will help me to analyze all this data.
And basically what Yuren's doing
is taking all this information that I gathered
and basically teaching computers to do the same thing,
so identifying animal sounds.
The program that Yuren's developing
will be able to help me process the data faster.
I'm very excited about this program
because I am trying to understand the impact
of sustainable logging on the biodiversity.
And I'm investigating how long it takes
for the biodiversity to recover
after the sustainable logging happens.
It would probably take me my entire life
to listen to all the recordings
and identify all the different sounds,
while this program will do it in like a week.
It will definitely help scientists to understand
what are the different conservation practices
that are working to protect forests
and conserve biodiversity.
Data science is important
because it helps scientists like me to analyze more data
than they are able to handle,
and it also helps us to see a bigger picture.
[birds singing]
[rousing music]