AI and Mathematical Modelling for Wildlife Conservation

Quantifying tourist pressure on wildlife using social media, photo-identification, and mathematical modelling

Dr Kostas Papafitsoros' work focuses on measuring the impact of ecotourist activities on one of the most important Mediterranean loggerhead sea turtle populations on Zakynthos Island, Greece. This is achieved via a variety of methods: Mathematical modelling, photo-identification (photo-ID), social media analysis and on-site data collection. Dr. Papafitsoros has developed a social media-based modelling workflow to measure the pressures of tourism on wildlife. The central idea is that the more often an individual animal appears on social media, the more viewing pressure it is subjected to. Dr. Papafitsoros and his collaborators modelled the flow of information from a human-animal interaction to that same event appearing in social media in a detectable way. The model was applied to measure the the ecotouristic pressure on sea turtles of Zakynthos Island, Greece a popular holiday destination with over 1 million visitors annually. It allowed to answer questions like: How did the viewing pressure on the sea turtles of Zakynthos change between June 2019 and June 2020? What about first week of August 2020 versus first week of August 2021?” Through the use of photo-ID, the viewing pressure can be measured to the level of individual turtles. Dr. Papafitsoros’ research has also revealed that there is strong evidence for a very high risk of trauma or mortality especially to resident individual turtles which strongly correlates with the pressure that they are subjected as this is measured by the social media-based model.

The Zakynthos Turtles interactive platform 

With the help of a 2023 QMUL Impact Acceleration Fund, and together with the NGO's ARCHELON and MEDASSET we have created a unique interactive web-platform Zakynthos Turtles, which actively engages visitors and tour operators with responsible sea turtle conservation on Zakynthos Island, Greece and helps towards an adoption of turtle-friendly attitude in ecotouristic activities. Through this platform, visitors upload images of unique turtles that they have observed for individual photo-identification and receive information about them in real time e.g., including their behaviours, interesting stories, and quantification of the human pressure that their observed turtle is subject to (as simplified dissemination of my research). Since 2024 the project is also supported by the British Chelonia Group.A related poster presentation presented at the International Sea Turtle Symposium 2024 can be found here.