Catching a wildlife poacher in the act is a tricky business. Just ask the officials and groups who have spent decades and millions of dollars searching for criminal animal hunters and traders operating covertly from South Africa to China. Their work is complicated by several factors, from government corruption that foils anti-poaching efforts to extreme poverty that draws people into the industry in the first place. Poachers tend to go about their illicit business under cover of night, and it's hard to find people among millions of square miles of pitch-black forest. "Eighty percent of poaching happens under the cover of darkness."

Poaching takes a brutal toll on the world's wildlife every year. By the thousands, rhinos are for their horns, elephants for their ivory, and tigers for their bones and exotic pelts. To protect these animals, rangers and conservationists must monitor enormous swaths of land, day and night, looking for poachers who trade on a black market estimated to total $40 billion. It's impossible to stop every poacher. New technology could bolster the efforts of conservationists, though, by putting a set of eyes in the sky.

Deep learning is affecting the way we interact with technology. Fortune's article, "Why Deep Learning is Suddenly Changing your Life", describes how deep learning is responsible for the immense improvements in many applications, from voice recognition to language translation. Deep learning is a form of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to learn by example. Deep learning models, trained by using a large set of labeled data and neural network architectures that contain many layers, routinely achieve impressive accuracy. The combination of large sets of labeled data and advances in computing power has enabled deep learning to impact many industries, from automated driving to medical devices.

Drones have the potential to play a big role in protecting endangered species, with a number of trials being conducted to investigate how small aerial surveillance aircraft can be used to combat poaching. The latest effort involves the use of artificial intelligence software to quickly identify poachers and animals in drone footage, in an attempt to better protect elephants and rhinos. Developed by Neurala, the software will be used by the Lindbergh Foundation in its efforts to combat poaching. It's designed to keep an eye on video as it's streamed back to researchers from drones in the field and identify animals, vehicles and poachers in real time without any human input. The software can analyze regular or infrared footage, so works with video taken day or night.

A young elephant was saved from drowning in a manmade structure in a Zimbabwe national park by a team that is using drones to deter poaching. An anti-poaching team saved a young elephant from drowning this month, and it was caught on video. The rescue was made by the Air Shepherd team in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park. Air Shepherd is a partnership between the Lindbergh Foundation and the company UAV and Drone Solutions, which is working to deter poachers in Hwange and other parks around Africa. During an early morning scouting mission, Air Shepherd drone pilots Tom Lautenbach and Gift Kgadima were driving in Hwange, getting a feel for the land that they have been flying their drones over for the past few weeks.

Instead of using guns to kill elephants and rhinoceroses, some poachers in Zimbabwe have begun poisoning the animals' water with cyanide? a practice some activists believe could be curbed by flying drones over parks in the African country. Although drone usage hasn't been proven to stop the killing of elephants, anti-poaching program Air Shepherd is prepared to use monitoring to help stop people from poisoning animals. The organization already flies drones over parks in three southern Africa countries at night to patrol for gun-toting poachers. The suspected cause of death, according to news reports, is cyanide, which has been used to kill hundreds of elephants in recent years. "The biggest problem that we have is that ivory is a business," said Otto Werdmuller Von Elgg, the CEO of UAV and Drone Solutions, a business partnering with the Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation to run the Air Shepherd program. "The poaching of the animals is the last thing that people want to solve.