Jeff A. Tracey, PhD
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Jeff A. Tracey, PhD

Conservation AI | Quantitative Ecology

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Research Associate at Conservation Biology Institute CBI


The Mission

We are at an unprecedented time. Never in human history has biodiversity — life on planet Earth — been under greater threat.

At the same time, never before have we had more powerful tools for gathering data from the wild and processing it to yield more useful insights and guide our decisions.

We simultaneously face a threat and have an opportunity.

My mission is to bring AI and other computational tools to bear on ecological research and conservation science so that we may effectively meet the challenge of protecting our home and the life we share it with.

Read more about the mission →


California sea lions at a southern California haulout (Photo: Jeff A. Tracey 2026)

About My Work

What I Do: I build machine learning tools for conservation — working across acoustic recordings, camera trap imagery, and UAV-based remote sensing, often under the messy, class-imbalanced conditions that real-world ecological datasets produce.

Background: My background spans field ecology to ecological and statistical modeling to artificial intelligence and computational science, and everywhere in between. I have worked as an ecologist and biostatistician at USGS Western Ecological Research Center before moving to USGS Advanced Research Computing as a computational scientist. I’m currently affiliated with the Conservation Biology Institute.

Current focus: Deep generative models for acoustic data augmentation, geospatial AI for sUAV (drone) survey data, and multi-modal approaches to species detection and behavioral analysis.

My story →

Mask R-CNN detections of marine animals on aerial ocean imagery that I captured with a DJI Air 3S. (Imagery and models by Jeff A. Tracey)

The Cognavitron — hover for details · click to navigate


Get in Touch

If the mission resonates — as a researcher, funder, student, collaborator, or someone who simply cares about wild places — I’d love to hear from you.

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