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How a teen’s AI model could help stop poaching in rainforests
A 17-year-old’s breakthrough AI may finally give wildlife rangers the real-time edge they need to stop poachers
February 27, 2026
17-year-old cracks the code on poacher tracking
A 17-year-old’s breakthrough AI may finally give wildlife rangers the real-time edge they need to stop poachers
By Melissa Hobson, Fonda Mwangi, Alex Sugiura & Kendra Pierre-Louis
[An image of an elephant walking in a wildlife reserve.]
David Silverman/Getty Images
[Illustration of a Bohr atom model spinning around the words Science Quickly with various science and medicine related icons around the text]
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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.
Wildlife poaching is a serious issue in many parts of the world. One way of monitoring poaching activity is to put recorders in the forest to listen for gunshots.
[CLIP: Gunshot]
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Pierre-Louis: Computer programs that use AI can help detect the crack of a gun. But accuracy is still a huge challenge when the forest is such a noisy place.
Freelance wildlife writer Melissa Hobson met someone who may have experienced a breakthrough: a 17-year-old high schooler who built an AI model that can accurately pick out gunshots from other jungle sounds.
What impact could this model make on gun-based poaching? Here’s Melissa with more about how it might help save elephants and other animals from the threat of illegal hunting.
[CLIP: Elephant vocalizations]
Melissa Hobson: That is the sound of an African forest elephant. To the untrained ear it might be indistinguishable from noises made by the animal’s relative, the African savanna elephant.
Both species are under threat. But while African savanna elephants are endangered, forest elephants are critically endangered. They’re also highly elusive. Living in dense tropical rainforests in central Africa and parts of West Africa they’re very hard to find and study.
Daniela Hedwig: As such we don’t know much about the forest elephants, and it’s very difficult to exactly know how many there still are.
Hobson: That’s Daniela Hedwig, director of the Elephant Listening Project at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University.
Hedwig: Our goal is to use acoustic monitoring to contribute to the conservation of the central African rainforest. We have about almost 100 acoustic units spread out in the area, covering almost 2,000 square kilometers [roughly 772 square miles] combined.
Hobson: These sound recorders are easily hidden, obscured by the tree branches. These devices enable the Elephant Listening Project to detect elephants through the rumbling vocalizations they use to communicate with one another, even when they’re kilometers apart.
[CLIP: Elephant vocalizations]
Hobson: This helps the experts learn more about the animals’ lives and population numbers without even seeing them.
But the recording devices don’t just pick up elephant sounds.
Hedwig: Acoustic monitoring is really great at recording these soundscapes and getting this really amazing picture of biodiversity by eavesdropping on nature.
Hobson: They also hear the sounds of human activity and can be an effective way of combating illegal poaching.
[CLIP: Gunshot]
Hobson: Illegal hunting poses a huge threat to animals such as elephants and rhinos. In many parts of Africa and Asia anti-poaching patrols roam national parks, often working with other law enforcement agencies to apprehend armed hunters. It’s time intensive and incredibly dangerous.
Hedwig: These are very, very brave people that are spending very large amounts of time in the forest under not fun circumstances, really jeopardizing their lives to protect biodiversity in the forest for their children and future generations.
Hobson: But how do the teams who are responsible for conservation efforts find a poacher in the vast expanse of, for example, an African national park?
Hedwig: Looking for poachers is basically like looking for a needle in the haystack.
Conservation managers, typically, they have informants in villages, and they have intelligence that tells them if there are certain activities ongoing. But catching [poachers] is very difficult.
Hobson: Trail cameras can help, but only up to a point.
Richard Hedley is a statistical ecologist at the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute in Edmonton, Canada. He explains the limitations of camera monitoring.
Richard Hedley: Trail cameras can only detect hunters in a very limited range immediately in front of the camera.
But what sometimes happens when people are monitoring hunting activity with cameras is that often the hunters don’t want to be photographed or don’t like to be photographed, so sometimes the cameras can be destroyed by hunters that don’t want to be photographed, or they can also be stolen because they need to be placed right next to a heavily used trail.
Hobson: Meanwhile, there are several benefits to using acoustic recording devices: they can be hidden high in the canopy and far from the trail, cover a wide area and are relatively low-maintenance.
Hedwig: Acoustic monitoring is really—if not the only method that can help you to really, systematically and in an unbiased way, collect information on where gunshots were fired.
Hobson: In 2022 Richard was part of a team that published a research paper focused on detecting gunshots from acoustic monitoring recordings.
The study took place in the protected Cooking Lake–Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area in central Alberta, Canada. At different times of the year people hunt ducks, geese, deer, elk and moose in this nearly 24,000-acre park.
Hedley: So we put out about 90 recording units across the protected area and set them to record, and then we went through the recordings to try to detect the gunshots as people were hunting within that park.
And so what we were able to show in the study was that acoustic monitoring can be a very effective tool for mapping out hunting activity.
Hobson: The recordings showed Richard and his colleagues where people tended to hunt: usually in the most accessible areas of the park, closer to the roads. The data also revealed that people generally stick to the park’s rule banning hunting on Sundays.
Hedley: So there [were] moderate levels of hunting from Monday to Friday, and then hunting activity really spiked on Saturdays and went down to practically zero on Sundays.
Hobson: At the time there were several challenges related to audio monitoring.
Hedley: A gunshot itself might last one or two seconds but might be embedded within hours or days or even weeks of recording from a location, so that really necessitates the use of computers to help us go through all of these recordings. There’s really no way that a human would be able to do that by themselves.
Hobson: And because the microphones can pick up sounds across long distances gunshots from farther away can sometimes be faint and hard to hear.
[CLIP: Gunshot in the distance]
Hobson: Both Richard’s and Daniela’s teams have encountered similar challenges while trying to listen for hunting activity, such as making out a gunshot amid a noisy soundscape.
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