Meet the man who just made your jungle safari a more fulfilling experience

Manjunath Gowda has developed an AI-powered app that substantially raises tourists' chances of spotting a tiger or leopard in the wild

Manjunath Gowda is a wildlife enthusiast, prone to actively taking off to sanctuaries and national parks in order to spot a tiger or a leopard in the wild. Most of the times, however, he would return disappointed, as there would be no sightings of any of the big cats even after his having spent several hours in the forest. 

Animal sightings, especially that of a tiger, is a complex activity. Tourists, with the help of professionals, take into consideration several factors before deciding which route to take in order to be able to spot a tiger or a leopard in the wild. Chances of sighting one, however, are typically less than 10 per cent.

This kind of stirred Gowda to the point that he decided to find out whether there was some kind of relation between weather conditions and other parametets and the appearance of a big cat in the forest. Gowda used AI and machine learning to establish such a link. “The national parks record the sightings (when a rare animal was last spotted) on the board. I would see it often and soon began thinking that there has to be a pattern. So, I told the tour guides to call me whenever they spotted the animal,” says Gowda.

This was in 2010, when not everybody had internet on phones. Initially, Gowda would do it as a hobby, and run data analytics on the sighting information back home to derive some insights.

A few years later, the challenge became a full time obsession. In 2016, Gowda developed an app he called WildTrails, to record instantaneous sightings and place them in the hands of over 100 wildlife tour guides at Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, Bandipur Tiger Reserve and National Park in Karnataka, and other reserves.

The sightings data would come twice a day -- once in the morning and and once in the evening -- and back at his work station, Gowda would work hard to study various pattern. He gathered data sets such as weather condition, the time the animal was spotted, the state of rains, and solar and lunar positions. He then tried to co-relate this data.

He  would write codes and run them over the data. For example, he would map how often a tiger was sighted at dusk, when there was a light breeze, and try and establish some co-relation between the sighting and the weather. If the analysis returned with a decent number of affirmatives, he would record that hypothesis as potentially true. “The job of analytics is to go, pull out the data, and map it across various external parameters- like new phone, sun pattern, weather pattern. rain and so on.”

With more algorithms being run on the data, the analytics would also uncover other factors that influence the chances of seeing the animal, and which the programmer would have missed at first go. 

Earlier, a successful sighting was a matter of pure luck and there was about one chance in ten that you would spot a tiger or other big cat on a safari. But now, customers who have ventured into the jungle using WildTrails, have come back with an 80 per cent sighting rate. This is nothing but pure play of AI and machine learning,” says Gowda.