South Africa is marking National Science Month this July, under the theme Science, Technology and Innovation are for Everyone. It is a fitting moment to talk about a partnership that has quietly answered one of conservation’s hardest questions, not with assumptions, but with evidence. 

With the help of artificial intelligence, Nature Connect is tracking the success of one of its conservation projects, built on nearly a decade of fieldwork by its own team. 

Joshua Salako, a master’s student from Nigeria studying at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) South Africa, has developed a system providing valuable insights about the endangered Western Leopard Toad‘s (Sclerophrys pantherina) behaviour. Nature Connect has worked with this species for almost ten years. As the organisation celebrates 25 years of Changing Lives Through Nature, assessing the effectiveness of the team’s Western Leopard Toad Underpass Project, with Joshua’s innovation, is especially important. 

“My research is an intersection between artificial intelligence and ecology,” Joshua said. 

Western Leopard Toads move across roads during their breeding season in the rainy winter months but are often hit by cars and killed in the process. This endangered amphibian is only found in the Western Cape and has been largely fragmented by human development. Ensuring toads can move safely and continue to reproduce is crucial, as more than 50% of their subpopulations are considered non-viable without conservation intervention. 

One of the toads’ important breeding sites is in an urban conservation area, the False Bay Nature Reserve, which is unfortunately bisected by a road and residential properties . Peninsula Road cuts straight through False Bay Nature Reserve, running through the middle of the toads’ breeding area. In 2021, Nature Connect partnered with William Dau Civils to install two tunnels running underneath the road in Zeekoevlei, a strategy made possible through funding from Fondation Ensemble and Leisure Charitable Trust. Another four tunnels were added in 2023 with additional funding from The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund and Forvia Foundation. 

None of Joshua’s research would have data to work with without the years of fieldwork that came before it. Nature Connect’s research monitors and volunteers have been logging toad activity since the tunnels were installed, and camera traps, sponsored by Hensoldt, set up in 2023 which Joshua’s models now run against. Toad deaths on the tunnelled stretch of road have dropped to almost zero (one death over three years), and monitors have witnessed toads venturing into the tunnels. Joshua’s work builds on that groundwork to answer the harder question: Whether the tunnels are working. 

“We are using mathematical models, computer vision models to be specific, to help detect camera trap images that contain the Western Leopard Toads,” Joshua said. 

The models flag which camera trap images contain toads, and Joshua crops them for comparison. 

“Basically, I use computer vision models to detect Western Leopard Toads at both ends of the tunnel and then compare these images to visually provide evidence of the use of these tunnels,” Joshua added. 

If Joshua can identify the same toad at both ends of a tunnel, using AI to detect its unique dorsal pattern, that’s direct evidence the toad used it to cross safely under the road instead of over it. 

The Western Leopard Toad Underpass Project has run since 2017. It stands as an example of what a research partnership can produce when years of fieldwork meet the right analytical tool. Nature Connect’s monitoring on the ground coming together with AIMS’ modelling has turned years of observation into hard evidence. 

This is what National Science Month asks South Africans to notice, that science happens in ordinary places, doing ordinary-sounding work that turns out to matter. It happens on a road through a nature reserve, in a master’s student’s code, and in years of logs kept by monitors and volunteers who never stopped watching. That is science for everyone, exactly where it is needed.