Millions of wildlife photos are wasting away on hard drives across the globe as conservationists struggle to collect the world’s camera trap images.
Enter Wildlife Insights: A new artificially intelligent platform—a partnership between Google and several organizations—that simplifies the process.
The online portal features more than 4.5 million snapshots mapped by species, location, date, and project.
You don’t need a biology degree to have a go: Narrow your search using filters, or just randomly zoom in and out for a bit of an adventure.
(I stumbled upon some beautiful wild-cat selfies in the Volcán Barva region of Costa Rica, where 67 cameras captured 39 species—including the Collared Peccary and Baird’s Tapir.)
“With photos and aggregated data available for the world to see, people can change the way protected areas are managed, empower local communities in conservation, and bring the best data closer to conservationists and decision makers,” Google said in a blog announcement.
Anyone with camera trap photos—from conservation scientists to backyard boffins—can upload their images to Google Cloud to run species identification AI models, visualize wildlife on a map, and even collaborate with others.
On average, human experts can label 300 to 1,000 images per hour, according to Google Earth Outreach program manager Tanya Birch and Conservation International senior wildlife scientist Jorge Ahumada.
With the help of Google AI Platform Predictions, Wildlife Insights can classify the same images up to 3,000 times faster, analyzing 3.6 million photos an hour, the pair explained.
Species identification is still a challenge for AI. But Google’s models, trained on the open-source TensorFlow framework, can spot jaguars, white-lipped peccaries, and African elephants with up to 98.6 percent accuracy.
“Most importantly, images detected to contain no animals with a very high confidence are removed automatically, freeing biologists to do science instead of looking at empty images of blowing grass,” Ahumada and Birch wrote on the blog.
With this treasure chest of knowledge, preservationists, organizations, and governments can better gauge the health of specific species, inform policies, and create conservation measures.
“While we’re just at the beginning of applying AI to better understand wildlife from sensors in the field,” Google said, “solutions like Wildlife Insights can help us protect our planet so that future generations can live in a world teeming with wildlife.”
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