Exploring Multimodal Foundation AI and Expert-in-the-Loop for Sustainable Management of Wild Salmon Fisheries in Indigenous Rivers
It addresses sustainable fisheries management for Indigenous communities and stakeholders in the Pacific Northwest, with incremental improvements through AI automation and expert validation.
This project tackled the challenge of monitoring wild salmon in remote Indigenous rivers by integrating multimodal foundation AI and expert-in-the-loop frameworks, resulting in AI-powered tools for automated species identification, counting, and length measurement that reduce manual effort and improve decision-making accuracy.
Wild salmon are essential to the ecological, economic, and cultural sustainability of the North Pacific Rim. Yet climate variability, habitat loss, and data limitations in remote ecosystems that lack basic infrastructure support pose significant challenges to effective fisheries management. This project explores the integration of multimodal foundation AI and expert-in-the-loop frameworks to enhance wild salmon monitoring and sustainable fisheries management in Indigenous rivers across Pacific Northwest. By leveraging video and sonar-based monitoring, we develop AI-powered tools for automated species identification, counting, and length measurement, reducing manual effort, expediting delivery of results, and improving decision-making accuracy. Expert validation and active learning frameworks ensure ecological relevance while reducing annotation burdens. To address unique technical and societal challenges, we bring together a cross-domain, interdisciplinary team of university researchers, fisheries biologists, Indigenous stewardship practitioners, government agencies, and conservation organizations. Through these collaborations, our research fosters ethical AI co-development, open data sharing, and culturally informed fisheries management.