In movies and literature, a wolf's haunting howl can signify danger or untamed nature.

In real life, in yellowstone national park, researchers are analyzing those howls with cutting edge ai technology to better monitor and track wolves.

Matt standal of pbs Montana explains.

>> The wolves across the river are howling.

Matt: Here in yellowstone, wolves from one of the parks' nine packs have made a kill.

It is the end of August, the peak of bison running or mating season, and a time when wolves increasingly pray on bison.

Many become injured or weakened during the fierce competition for a mate and the wolves take advantage.

This technician, Jeremy, is monitoring the pack as they feed and teach curious tourists about wolves.

>> We are going to count how many they are, record their behavior, and see what the carcasses, almost certainly a killed, and if we are quiet, we can hear howling.

[Wolves howling] >> They have become central to a new cutting edge conservation project using artificial intelligence to decode sound recordings.

This development in the field of bio acoustics could redefine how wolves like these are monitored in the wild.

[Wolves howling] >> Since 1995, wren -- when gray wolves were introduced into yellowstone, they had used helicopters to attract them, and dart guns to tag them so they can be fitted with radio and gps collars.

>> You can see most of the wolf talking happens at night.

Att: Now bio acoustics is offering a less invasive way to study them, using sound and advances in ai to one day potentially decode wills communication by matching their howls with specific behavior.

[Wolves howling] >> Not only can we hear them and record 24/7, three hundred 65 days a year, but we can often link behaviors of wolves by observing them when they are vocalizing.

What is the cause and effect?

Matt: The senior wildlife biologist for yellow national -- yellowstone national park gathers data from sounder quarters like this one, hidden in a tree near park headquarters .

Her team has been recording the barks, yelps, and howls of yellowstone's nine wolf packs, more than 100 wolves from the past year.

>> That is another goal of ours, can we detect the signatures and use that?

Matt: They have collected over 7000 wolf sounds and have been able to identify the acoustic signatures of several wolf packs in the park.

In the future, he thinks the bio acoustic work could partially replace the hazardous duty of capturing and coloring wolves.

>> What I envisioned a decade from now is that we may not have to put callers out in certain areas of the park and with new ai tools, we hope -- I'm not sure, but we hope we can answer questions about what are wolves saying?

Or can we count them and identify unique individuals?

Good morning.

My name is -- [howling] Matt: A linguistics researcher and software engineer, Dr.

Jeff reed, has experimented with ai to study wolves near his home just north of yellowstone.

He is lending his technical expertise to the yellowstone wolf project.

>> This is a wolf course howl, and we are using ai from googled to see if we can count the number of wolves.

This is a group of wolves.

It is like you walking into a bar and all the people are talking, and you can pick out a particular person in the room.

Wolves can pick out other wolves they know in this cacophony of sound.

[Wolves howling] Matt: The key to the technology is pattern recognition.

These colorful patterns are what is called a spectrogram of wolf powers, representing their strength and frequency over time .

Artificial intelligence, he says, can pick out the patterns and identify individual wolves faster than any human could.

>> These battery-operated devices use ai.

Matt: He leads a company that makes high-tech I-8 enabled video cameras and audio recorders that yellowstone is using to monitor their vast space.

But these cameras called grizz cameras don't just listen to wildlife.

They can pick up human conversations and activities from hundreds of miles away.

Animal science and human privacy in yellowstone could soon be on a collision course.

25 of these cameras will be installed in a grid across the park, thanks to a large donation from a company called colosso bio scientists.

>> For me, the moonshot was can we reduce the conflict between wolves and humans?

Matt: Matt James is the chief animal officer at colosso bioscience and says ai recording technology can be used to protect wolves from humans.

>> And can we explain that these are empathetic, emotionally complex animals that are not mindless hunters, and they deserve the ability to coexist with us.

Matt: Colosso is spending 175 thousand dollars of yellowstone's bio acoustic study.

Plus, the company hired ai scientists to analyze the data that the cameras are collecting.

>> We are hopeful that they can collect kinds of data that our team can then begin to train the ai to move on from classifying one call to individual calls.

Matt: As you mentioned, that data could include sounds and activities from people in the park.

The technology is so new that they are still trying to understand the implications for human privacy and wild places like yellowstone.

>> This is old data that can be collected.

Matt: University of Montana philosophy professor, Christopher Preston, studies the ethics of human interactions with the natural world and how technology can shape those interactions.

>> If you ask me what I rather a wolf get started from a helicopter and have a radio call or put on it or get listen to by a 24/7 recording device, it is pretty clear that I would rather have them be listened to by the recording device because that is non-invasive.

Much less likely to cause any sort of harm to the animal involved.

Matt: But Preston worries the cameras could inadvertently vacuum up human sound and images without people knowing they are being recorded.

>> We do have a different sort of ethic in the human world to the one that we have for the wild world.

Ou are not going to be part of a system where people are looking at you, where people know what you were doing.

And you certainly are not getting away from it all if there is a potential for your movement to go into a database somewhere.

Matt: As yellowstone experiments with this controversial new technology, one biologist is eager for more grizz cameras to be installed in the coming months.

He believes ai powered bio acoustics will help his team better protect these iconic animals as they learn more from every howl that reverberates across this majestic landscape.

>> We are going to keep the study going with new emerging questions, but the final question will be why is yellowstone's wildlife important to this landscape, important to Montana, and important to the world?

Matt: I met Matthew standoff in yellowstone national park.