Wildbook: Crowdsourcing, computer vision, and data science for conservation

TL;DR

Wildbook is an autonomous system that uses crowdsourced images and computer vision to identify, count, and monitor wildlife populations, significantly aiding conservation efforts and enabling large-scale citizen science initiatives.

Contribution

This paper introduces Wildbook, a novel system that leverages crowdsourced images and computer vision for wildlife identification, census, and conservation, including the first full species census using citizen photographs.

Findings

Wildbook enabled the first full census of Grevy's zebra using citizen photos.

The system has been adopted by IUCN for official species census data.

Wildbook successfully tracks animals using social media images.

Abstract

Photographs, taken by field scientists, tourists, automated cameras, and incidental photographers, are the most abundant source of data on wildlife today. Wildbook is an autonomous computational system that starts from massive collections of images and, by detecting various species of animals and identifying individuals, combined with sophisticated data management, turns them into high resolution information database, enabling scientific inquiry, conservation, and citizen science. We have built Wildbooks for whales (flukebook.org), sharks (whaleshark.org), two species of zebras (Grevy's and plains), and several others. In January 2016, Wildbook enabled the first ever full species (the endangered Grevy's zebra) census using photographs taken by ordinary citizens in Kenya. The resulting numbers are now the official species census used by IUCN Red List: http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/7950/0. In 2016, Wildbook partnered up with WWF to build Wildbook for Sea Turtles, Internet of Turtles (IoT), as well as systems for seals and lynx. Most recently, we have demonstrated that we can now use publicly available social media images to count and track wild animals. In this paper we present and discuss both the impact and challenges that the use of crowdsourced images can have on wildlife conservation.