Will AI replace Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists?

Some of your tasks will be automated. People who use AI will have the edge.

Task exposure to today's AI

47/100

Moderate exposure

This is the occupation's typical task mix. Your own score can be up to 30 points higher or lower depending on how you work: routine share, people contact, judgment and how much you already use AI.

Get your personal score

Will AI replace Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists?

Not entirely. Today's AI tools can take on about 47% of the typical work in this occupation, mostly: disseminate information by writing reports and scientific papers or journal articles, and by making presentations and giving talks for schools, clubs, interest groups and park interpretive programs. The parts that stay human include: Inventory or estimate plant and wildlife populations.; Perform administrative duties, such as fundraising, public relations, budgeting, and supervision of zoo staff.; Develop, or make recommendations on, management systems and plans for wildlife populations and habitat, consulting with stakeholders and the public at large to explore options..

People who learn to use AI for the automatable parts keep the edge. The 3-phase plan below shows where to start.

Which tasks AI can take on

The largest tasks in this occupation, their share of the working week, and how much of each today's AI tools can do.

TaskAutomatable

Disseminate information by writing reports and scientific papers or journal articles, and by making presentations and giving talks for schools, clubs, interest groups and park interpretive programs. 70%

Study animals in their natural habitats, assessing effects of environment and industry on animals, interpreting findings and recommending alternative operating conditions for industry. 55%

Study characteristics of animals, such as origin, interrelationships, classification, life histories, diseases, development, genetics, and distribution. 53%

Inventory or estimate plant and wildlife populations. 42%

Develop, or make recommendations on, management systems and plans for wildlife populations and habitat, consulting with stakeholders and the public at large to explore options. 35%

Perform administrative duties, such as fundraising, public relations, budgeting, and supervision of zoo staff. 28%

+ 8 more tasks (28% of the week) in the full test.

Your human edge

Inventory or estimate plant and wildlife populations.
Perform administrative duties, such as fundraising, public relations, budgeting, and supervision of zoo staff.
Develop, or make recommendations on, management systems and plans for wildlife populations and habitat, consulting with stakeholders and the public at large to explore options.

AI tools to try

ChatGPT / Claude for literature and writingAI research tools (e.g. Elicit, Consensus, Semantic Scholar)Copilot for data analysis code (Python, R)

Related roles

A 3-phase AI learning plan

Phase 1

Faster literature and writing

Literature search and summaries with AI, always checked against the papers.
Drafts of methods, reports and grant text.
Reference management and formatting.

Project

Use AI to draft a 15-paper literature review and methods section for one upcoming survey, verify every claim and citation against the PDFs, and log hours saved versus your last review.

Phase 2

AI for data analysis

Analysis code in Python or R written with AI help.
Visualisation and statistics explained step by step.
Reproducibility: version code and prompts.

Project

Rebuild one past population-estimate analysis as an AI-assisted, version-controlled R or Python script with occupancy models and publication-ready figures, checking results match your original numbers.

Phase 3

AI as a research method

Classification, extraction or modelling with AI on your data.
Validate against human labels or ground truth.
Ethics, data protection and disclosure of AI use.

Project

Train or prompt an AI image classifier on 1,000 of your camera-trap photos, score its species labels against your own on a 200-image holdout set, and document accuracy, limits and AI-use disclosure.

Take the free 11-question test