A breakthrough in photo-based AI could give Alaska wildlife managers better data without putting hands on the animals.
Updated: 17 minutes agoA female brown bear at the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary on the Alaska Peninsula. Time and again, colleagues told bear biologist Beth Rosenberg that her quest to develop a new and less invasive way“It just won’t work,” she heard repeatedly.
Inspired by her hero, the acclaimed primatologist Jane Goodall, Rosenberg stubbornly pushed ahead, just as Goodall had done decades earlier in the face of great skepticism.brown bear sanctuary, Rosenberg had quickly learned that by paying close attention, she, like others on the sanctuary staff, could over time identify the “regulars” who fished at McNeil Falls, especially mature males. It’s true the sample size was small.
But if people could learn to recognize individual bears among the dozens that pass through McNeil River each summer — and do so repeatedly, despite dramatic changes in their seasonal appearance — wouldn’t it be possible to do the same thing at greater scale, using new, state-of-the-art technologies? Rosenberg began to build a photo database of McNeil’s most recognizable bears, as others on staff had done before her.
And when promoted to assistant manager in 2016, she made expanding that database a priority. Over the next several years, she enlarged it to nearly 73,000 images, representing 109 individual bears. — and an enthusiastic supporter of her work — Rosenberg then went looking for computer and technology whizzes who could assist in this quest. The two eventually found such a group at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, led by Alexander Mathis.
One of the keys to clinching the partnership was Rosenberg’s immense file of bear images, which Wolf — eventually her research colleague as well as mentor — describes as “a data set that’s unique in the world; there’s nothing else like it. ” Another key was Mathis and Rosenberg’s shared excitement about the possibilities their collaboration might open up.
Combining their expertise, a team composed of Alaska biologists and Swiss computer scientists was able to develop an artificial intelligence — or as Rosenberg prefers to say, “deep learning” — system that they call“Trained” on the data set of nearly 73,000 McNeil River images, PoseSwin has proved capable of recognizing individual bears across seasons — and even years — despite major changes in the animals’ body size, fur condition and position, and seasonal and environmental variations, such as light and weather conditions. Importantly, the researchers emphasize, their work demonstrates it’s possible to accurately — and repeatedly — identify individual bears across space and time using photographs alone, what Rosenberg calls “photo ID.
” This means there’s no need to physically handle and mark the animals, for instance with collars or tags, or to retrieve fur or blood samples, as routinely done in conventional population studies and other research. That in turn opens all sorts of new possibilities for the study, management and conservation of brown bears — and other species — in Alaska and beyond.
Adding greatly to the credibility of their work, the Alaska-Swiss team produced an article describing their research and findings: “Individual identification of brown bears using pose-aware metric learning” was published in the February 2026 issue of the prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journalWhile it’s not possible to get into the details of their work in a commentary of this length, the bottom line, say Rosenberg and Wolf, is that the low-impact, “hands-off” PoseSwin/photo ID program promises to revolutionize the way bears are studied and understood by “adding a new tool to our toolbox,” as Wolf puts it. And a greatly advanced tool at that.
The Alaska-Swiss team plans to keep expanding its data set and refining its PoseSwin program. All of this will lead to an increased understanding of bears’ individual and collective behavior and interactions with each other and other species, including — and especially — humans. That knowledge in turn promises to lead to more informed, fact-based management of both the animals and the habitat that is essential to their well-being, which can only benefit their conservation.
Here I’ll leave the science arena and move into an area where Rosenberg, Wolf and the rest of the PoseSwin team prefer not to tread: wildlife politics.that many wildlife advocates, including myself, regard as suspect. That’s not so much because the research methods are faulty, but rather because the information is outdated and/or withheld from the public. This is especially true for predators such as bears and wolves and “intensive management” programs intended to “control” their numbers.
The recent — and ongoing — Mulchatna bear kill program in Southwest Alaska is a prime example. Over the past three years, Fish and Game has killed close to 200 bears, the great majority of them brown bears, ostensibly to help the Mulchatna Caribou Herd recover from a steep decline that Fish and Game’s own biologists have shown has nothing to do with bear predation, without any good idea of the region’s overall bear population.
This is a major reason two Superior Court judges ordered the department to stop its Mulchatna bear kill effort in 2025. Fish and Game managers continue to insist that their intensive management and predator control programs are based on “good science,” but remain unwilling to share the specifics of what that science shows or how it’s been done.
An Alaska Superior Court judgeto resume shooting bears in Southwest Alaska this spring to boost the caribou herd, a plan moving forward despite a lack of comprehensive population data. It may be asking too much for Fish and Game’s current wildlife managers to welcome, let alone embrace, the revolutionary research methods promised by PoseSwin and photo ID.
But we can hope that with a change in Alaska’s leadership following this year’s gubernatorial election, a more open and progressive state-run wildlife management program will be put in place, whose leaders recognize the benefits of a new research system truly grounded in fact-based scientific methods.is a widely published essayist and the author of more than a dozen books, including “Alaska’s Bears” — a collaboration with photographer Tom Walker — and “Animal Stories: Encounters with Alaska’s Wildlife. ”The Anchorage Daily News welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email
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