Researchers using artificial intelligence to grade decades of conservation efforts have determined we're getting better at reintroducing once-endangered species to the wild. In their study published Thursday in the journal Patterns, the researchers analyzed the abstracts of more than 4,000 studies of species reintroduction across four decades and found that we're generally improving in our conservation efforts. The authors hope that machine learning could be used in this field, as well as others, to discover the best techniques and solutions from the ever-growing plethora of scientific research. "We wanted to learn some lessons from the vast body of conservation biology literature on reintroduction programs that we could use here in California as we try to put sea otters back into places they haven't roamed for decades," said senior author Kyle Van Houtan, chief scientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. "But what sat in front of us was millions of words and thousands of manuscripts. We wondered how we could extract data from them that we could actually analyze, and so we turned to natural language processing."