In case you didn't know, it's Fat Bear Week--the annual tournament that pits the brown bears of Katmai National Park against each other to see who gained the most weight over the year. You can vote for your favorite bear in a March Madness-style bracket where one is crowned the biggest bear of the bunch by the week's end. It's a fun and cheeky project hosted by the U.S. National Parks Service and Explore.org, a multimedia organization best known for the live cams of wildlife like the Brooks Falls Brown Bears of Katmai National Park. While the stream enjoys a healthy and devoted following throughout the year--folks who have created fan wikis, forums, and stan communities for individual bears--its viewer count balloons like its eponymous creatures when Fat Bear Week rolls around. And, as it turns out, it's these very same viewers who can help keep the bears alive and thriving in a world that's rapidly endangering their ecosystems. "We have thousands who watch the bear cams, especially right now with Fat Bear Week," Ed Miller, the co-founder of the BearID Project conservation group, told The Daily Beast.

San Francisco (CNN Business)It's hard for the average person to tell Dani, Lenore, and Bella apart: They all sport fashionably fuzzy brown coats and enjoy a lot of the same activities, like playing in icy-cold water and, occasionally, ripping apart a freshly caught fish. Melanie Clapham is not the average person. As a bear biologist, she has spent over a decade studying these grizzly bears, who live in Knight Inlet in British Columbia, Canada, and developed a sense for who is who by paying attention to little things that make them different. "I use individual characteristics -- say, one bear has a nick in its ear or a scar on the nose," she said. But Clapham knows most people don't have her eye for detail, and the bears' appearances change dramatically over the course of a year -- such as when they get winter coats and fatten up before denning -- which makes it even harder to distinguish between, say, Toffee and Blonde Teddy.

Researchers say the new technology, termed BearID, created a'non-invasive' technique to study the animals. Despite a decade of behavioural research on grizzly bears in B.C.'s Knight Inlet, Melanie Clapham still has trouble telling some individual bears apart. Brown bears, which include grizzly bears, can change dramatically in their appearance during their younger years and, unlike other wildlife that has spots or stripes, they lack distinguishing markings on their bodies. Ms. Clapham, a conservation biologist and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Victoria, dreamed of technology that could help her individually identify these furry mammals. While she was looking for a tech team to make that idea possible, south of the border, Ed Miller and Mary Nguyen, two Silicon Valley engineers who are also outdoor and wildlife enthusiasts, had started a project to develop machine-learning models that could be adapted to grizzly bears.

Ed Miller and Mary Nguyen are Silicon Valley software developers by day, but moonlight at solving an unusually fuzzy problem. A few years ago the pair became mesmerized, like many of us, by an Alaskan webcam broadcasting brown bears from Katmai National Park. They also happened to be seeking a project to hone their machine learning expertise. "We thought, machine learning is really great at identifying people, what could it do for bears?" Could artificial intelligence used for face recognition be harnessed to discern one bear face from another?

Grizzly bears have domed shoulders, tall foreheads, and pale-tipped fur that gives them their grizzled appearance. If you're comparing two bears, one might be lighter or darker in color, or fatter for hibernation. But for the most part, there's no universal, unique marker a person can use to tell two bears apart. This issue is a challenge for scientists like University of Victoria wildlife conservationist Melanie Clapham, whose research on grizzly bear behavior requires her to monitor individual bears over years, Adam van der Zwan reports for CBC. But now, Clapham and her research team have developed a solution: facial recognition for bears. Bears grow and shrink a lot depending on the season, and their appearance changes frequently during their 20- to 25-year-long lifespans.