Machine learning is making NOAA's efforts to save ice seals and belugas faster - FedScoop

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists are preparing to use machine learning (ML) to more easily monitor threatened ice seal populations in Alaska between April and May. Ice flows are critical to seal life cycles but are melting due to climate change -- which has hit the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions hardest. So scientists are trying to track species' population distributions. But surveying millions of aerial photographs of sea ice a year for ice seals takes months. And the data is outdated by the time statisticians analyze it and share it with the NOAA assistant regional administrator for protected resources in Juneau, according to a Microsoft blog post.