UC Davis Hackathon Supports Wild Horse Conservation Efforts

Students from UC Davis recently participated in a 24-hour hackathon dedicated to social good, supporting the American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign) in their efforts to develop scalable infrastructure for wild equidfertility controlprograms across the nation.

Wild horses and burros, federally protected wildlife species, play a unique historical and biological role in the Western United States. Horses originally evolved in North America before spreading globally. Some bands were reintroduced to the Americas by European colonizers, andrecent research indicates horses and humanscoexisted in the Americas long before that. Descendants of these original populations continue to roam wild across the West today.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) spends over $95 million annually to remove horses from public lands in the West and hold them in captivity. In 2013, the National Academy of Sciencescriticized BLM's removal programfor exacerbating the issue. AWHC advocates for a better solution:fertility control.

To supportfertility controlprograms and keep wild horses wild, AWHC is developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) app called the Wild Horse ANimal Identifier, orWild Horse ANI. This mobile app will helpfertility controldarters identify individual horses, trackfertility controldosing, and update horse population data directly in the field. Wild Horse ANI will utilize theWildMe open source AI engineto power individual horse identification.

AI offers significant potential to advancefertility controlby ensuring adequate dosing over several years. However, wild horses present unique challenges as they lack readily identifiable visible fingerprints, unlike species such as zebras, whales, and giraffes. Using AI for wild horses requires a substantial investment in collecting tens of thousands of horse images to train the AI for individual identification.

To develop an app for collecting photos to train the AI, AWHC collaborated withHackDavis, a UC Davis 24-hour hackathon where over a thousand students from the region built apps for social good. AWHC was selected as one of three non-profit organizations for the 2023 hackathon. The challenge was to create an app that would enable the general public to participate in saving wild horses.

Hackathon winnersAkshat Adsule,Harsh Karia,Terry Tong, andAarav Urgaonkardeveloped mobile apps that not only captured horse pictures in the correct format directly from mobile phones but also facilitated photo sharing to encourage wider participation. AWHC is excited to partner with these students to advance their initial ideas and build the photo collection app to support the Wild Horse ANI platform.

AWHC plans to launch Wild Horse ANI for production use by the end of 2023.