But the technology is also being prepared for another evolution in which it could track individual animals, both friend and foe, across Tasmanian wilderness.
The Tasmanian Land Conservancy revealed the unusual technology deployment on Friday after partnering with Ionata Digital and the University of Tasmania.
Its announcement comes after AI's deployment in other conservation projects, including tracking humpback whales down Australia's east coast and identifying koala populations in NSW.
In the Tasmanian WildTracker project, AI is being used to analyse photos captured by "camera traps" placed by participants on private land.
The software, called Stickybeak, uses several AI models, including one from the University of Tasmania, to identify whether animals have been captured by the cameras.
Volunteers had previously been asked to manually sort through photos looking for wildlife, Tasmanian Land Conservancy ecologist Glen Bain said, but the task was arduous and time-consuming.
Even experienced workers could only sort through about 500 photos every hour, he said.
"For one of our larger projects where we were looking for eastern quolls, there are 400 cameras and we collect millions of photos that we need to process and classify," Dr Bain told AAP.
"That's the key reason why we needed AI to help us."
Shortly after introducing the technology, Stickybeak identified more than 258,000 blank photographs out of a library of more than 774,000 images, which was equivalent to saving 900 hours of volunteer's time.
The AI tool could also identify animals within photographs, Dr Bain said, although while it had become proficient with some creatures, it also delivered some humorous results.
"It's very good at the more common species, like our Tasmanian pademelons, our wallabies and our brushtail possums," he said.
"It does seem to have a thing for the fur seal and a bird called a Lewin's rail which is a quite shy and rare bird to pop up on camera."
The Stickybeak software had also highlighted animals camouflaged within photos that volunteers had been unable to spot.
A software update developed by University of Tasmania researchers is expected to improve its animal identification skills.
Ionata Digital general manager Toby Wilson said a further evolution of the software could see it track individual animals.
They could include eastern quolls, for example, as well as pests such as feral cats and fallow deer.
"A lot of native animals have individual markings and individual tracking points," Mr Wilson said.
"We could use this technology to see the transition of Tasmanian devils through southern Tasmania, for example, and see whether their prevalence is increasing or decreasing."
While the AI software had sped up the process of analysing images, Dr Bain said one of its biggest benefits was the time it gave back to the conservancy's workers and volunteers to improve environments for wildlife.
"It means we can spend our time thinking and performing actions, rather than just mindlessly looking at photos," he said.
Other Australian projects to use AI include a partnership between Google and Griffith University to track humpback whales, and a Western Sydney University program to identify the mating calls of koalas.
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