UC Davis Hackathon Supports Wild Horse Conservation Efforts

May 30, 2023

AWHC Contributor

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 equid fertility control programs across the nation.

AWHC 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, and recent research indicates horses and humans coexisted 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 Sciences criticized BLM's removal program for exacerbating the issue. AWHC advocates for a better solution: fertility control.

To support fertility control programs and keep wild horses wild, AWHC is developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) app called the Wild Horse ANimal Identifier, or Wild Horse ANI. This mobile app will help fertility control darters identify individual horses, track fertility control dosing, and update horse population data directly in the field. Wild Horse ANI will utilize the WildMe open source AI engine to power individual horse identification.

AI offers significant potential to advance fertility control by 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 with HackDavis, 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 winners Akshat Adsule, Harsh Karia, Terry Tong, and Aarav Urgaonkar developed 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.