wildID: Pioneering Biotechnology For Wildlife Crime Detection And Prevention

A police officer at a border checkpoint or a wildlife inspector searching a suspect’s home can now point a smartphone at a bird egg and get an instant, legally admissible species identification. The problem is that wildlife crime investigators currently have no reliable way to tell one raptor egg from another. Many protected species—such as peregrine falcons, golden eagles, and hen harriers—lay eggs that look nearly identical to those of common, unprotected birds. Without forensic tools, traffickers can claim seized eggs belong to legal species, and prosecutions collapse. wildID fills this gap by training machine learning algorithms on thousands of digital images of eggs from known species, creating the first AI-driven forensic tool for egg identification. If this research succeeds, environmental crime units across the UK and internationally will gain a rapid, field-deployable forensic capability that currently does not exist. The app runs on standard mobile hardware and requires no specialist training, meaning non-experts can collect evidence that holds up in court. This could dramatically increase prosecution rates for illegal egg collecting and trafficking, which is a major threat to already vulnerable bird-of-prey populations. The technology also establishes a template for applying machine learning to other hard-to-identify wildlife products, such as reptile skins or timber.