Queensland Koala Crusaders has embarked on a Community-facilitated, large-scale AI-powered koala road safety monitoring project in partnership with Griffith University and a number of other southeast Queensland Koala conservation groups.

This project proposes to build an AI-powered, community facilitated large-scale koala road safety monitoring network with 100 remotely connected cameras throughout South East Queensland (SEQ).

The monitoring, using strategically placed remotely triggered trail cameras, aims to measure the number and frequency of koalas using fauna infrastructure, road crossing behaviour and other behaviours in the vicinity of roads as well as detecting sick or injured koalas and the presence of threats from other domestic or feral animals.

The cameras capture short (10 second) bursts of motion pictures which are fed directly into the AI powered monitoring system at Griffith University which has been developed to differentiate koalas from other fauna.

Linda and David spent the day deploying trail cameras on a private property in the Samford area with a known koala population using a habitat corridor that runs perpendicular to a very busy road.  It is hoped that these cameras will provide useful information about the movement of koalas along this corridor towards the road.

We will be deploying cameras in a second location to further this work in the next few weeks.  The cameras will be in place for approximately a year so have the potential to gather huge amounts of data.