Tracking illegal cattle farming with AI

In collaboration with the NGO Global Witness, which investigates human rights abuses surrounding conflicts over natural resources, Laradji et al. (2020) built a machine learning model to track illegal cattle ranching based on high-resolution (40cm) satellite imagery. “Cattle farming is responsible for 8.8% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. … While some regulations are in place for preserving the Amazon against deforestation, these are being flouted in various ways, hence the need to scale and automate the monitoring of cattle ranching activities.” The paper has been accepted to the Tackling Climate Change with ML Workshop at NeurIPS 2020, and training code is available on GitHub at IssamLaradji/cownter_strike.