Keeping tabs on sharks could help conservation, and AI may be able to help.

Francesco Ferretti, assistant professor of fisheries management and conservation at Virginia Tech, dives in.

Dr. Francesco Ferretti is a quantitative computational ecologist specialized in research synthesis. He combines ecology, statistical modeling, and data science to approach questions on animal abundance, species interactions, structure, and functioning of large marine ecosystems. Dr. Ferretti has been working on the ecology and conservation of sharks for two decades. Dr. Ferretti’s studies have proven relevant for the public and policy. They have been repeatedly covered in the major US and international news outlets and have contributed to promoting important legislation for the conservation of sharks and rays at the international and national levels. Dr. Ferretti is an assistant professor of Fisheries Management and Conservation at Virginia Tech, has a Ph.D. in Marine Ecology from Dalhousie University in Halifax (Canada), an MSc in Marine Biology from the Polytechnic University of Marche in Ancona (Italy) and several years of postdoctoral research experience at Stanford University.

Taking the Pulse of Global Shark Populations

We are living through a series of powerful revolutions: Big Data, digital communication, and artificial intelligence. And these waves of change are transforming everything, including science.

In marine science, they have opened up a sea of possibilities. One of the biggest? Saving sharks.

Shark populations around the world are shrinking fast, unable to withstand pressure from global fishing. Nearly a third of all shark and ray species are now threatened with extinction. But here’s the problem, sharks are among the most data-poor animals in the ocean. For many species, we often don’t even have the basic data to understand where they are, how they live, or how many are left.

That’s where SharkPulse comes in.

It is a AI-driven global citizen science platform that collects shark photos from the internet, social media, and smartphones, and turns them into real scientific data. Every photo you take with your smartphone can include not just an image, but also the time and location, key data for tracking where sharks live and how their populations change.

With almost 100K validated records so far, covering more than half of all known shark species, SharkPulse is helping to fill massive data gaps, even for rare and endangered species. It started with a simple app. Now, powered by AI, it mines social networks for shark photos and asks users to help confirm them, transforming casual snapshots into conservation tools.

The goal? Go from data deficiency to big data, and help save sharks before it is too late.

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