Elephants counted from space for conservation project - CBBC Newsround

It could allow up to 5,000 sq km of elephant habitat - that's the area of around 700,000 football pitches - to be searched through on a single cloud-free day.

All the elephant counting is done via machine learning - a computer algorithm trained to identify elephants in a variety of backdrops.

"We just present examples to the algorithm and tell it, 'This is an elephant, this is not an elephant,'" said Dr Olga Isupova, from the University of Bath.

The scientists looked first at South Africa's Addo Elephant National Park.

"It has a high density of elephants," said Dr Isla Duporge, a conservation scientist from the University of Oxford.

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