A new innovative effort could greatly expand our knowledge or where are wild things.
Placed by researchers in forests and natives worldwide, the cameras of the movement detector, known as “camera traps”, place thousands of photos of animals rarely seen by human eyes. These involuntary selfies have tried scientists an unparalleled vision of households (and habits) of wildlife.
A researcher who establishes a camera trap in Udzungwa National Park. (© Benjamin Drummond)
These data are critical to develop intelligent policies for the conservation of wildlife, according to Jorge Ahumada, a conservation scientist International.
But there is an inconvenience to have all this data, he says: It is not being shared.
“Technology has made it very easy to collect this data, but we don’t have access to it,” said Ahumada. “There are camera traps everywhere and millions of images of cameras of cameras out there. But most of these images are on people’s computers and databases. It is a great lost opportunity for conservation.”
That is about to change, thanks to Wildlife Insights, a cloud -based platform operated in association by Conservation International, the National Institute of Biology of the Zoo and the Smithsonian Conservation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the North Carolina North Carolina Museum of North Carolina, World Foundation for Nature, the Zoological Society of London, Map of Life of Life and Google and implemented. The new platform will allow researchers, and literally, any other person to see, share and analyze data and images of camera trap.
Nearby meetings
The camera traps have already revolutionized conservation, says Ahumada, who knows one or two things about the monitoring of species of his first days as a field biologist who studies spider monkeys in Colombia.
“All who have studied monkeys in tropical areas know that they know long hours of walking, finding all possible imaginable creatures that the monkeys you are studying expose,” he said.
One day in the forest, he saw something he had never seen before.
“There were two of them: they looked like small dogs, with short ears, short tails and a snorted snout,” he said. “They escaped as soon as they smelled.” He returned to the camp with enthusiasm, with the account of screafleas what he had.
“No one believed me,” he said, laughing.
Thirty years later, Ahumada was reviewing the camera kick data from a site in the Peruvian Amazon when an image caught his attention.
“Do you guess what I see? These two dogs,” he said.
Two rarely seen Bush dogs are captured in the first time in the Yanachaan-Chemillén National Park, Peru, by team traps. (© courtesy of Team Network and Missouri Botanical Garden)
What Ahumada had seen three decades before was extremely strange.
These little animals are called shrubs (Speothos venaticus). Near the size of a medium dog, it is known that they hunt in small packages, and although its geographical range is very large (Panama south of Brazil), they are rarely a sea of 700,000 cameras cameras, says that dogs take Ahumada.
Even these relatively few documented sights, equal to 3 out of 10,000 identified images, provide sufficient data to study these animals.
“The data is critical,” said Ahumada. “Otherwise, we trust anecdotes.”
More data, more problems
Knowing if a particular species is in a particular place at a particular moment, and not return to see if it is still there, it tells you nothing about what is happening to the species, says Ahumada. By tirelessly monitoring forest patches, he says, camera traps help solve this problem.
But its ability to create data is as useful as humans’s ability to examine it.
“This is one of the main reasons why people do not share data, it is very difficult to process them,” said Ahumada. “You end with thousands of images, and you have to look through each one, craft. It is very tedious.”
In addition, while many camera trap projects are designed to study one or a few species, the camera traps do not discriminate, taking sincere shots of any creature that enters the view. Much of the data on this “capture by way” are never shared, depriving other scientists of the opportunity to see or analyze them.
The knowledge of wildlife sacrifice a crucial incentive to persuade scientists to share their photos: unique processing power. Working with Google, the platform has developed automatic learning algorithms to automatically identify and label species, even repeated images of the same animal, in some cases, much faster than any researcher.
“The analysis that used to take months now,” said Ahumada.
The culture of exchange of the new platform extends beyond the fair data: any tool and another complement will be shared, says smoked, as well as the photos of the camera trap, under the Creative Commons licenses.
However, there are some notable exceptions. Users can place their data under embargo for a limited time if these data are used for an investigation still to publish. In addition, the exact locations of the commercial species hunted and in danger of extinction will darken to prevent furtive digital experts from using the data for illegal purposes, which are discussed in the recently published research of Ahumada.
The next generation
Wild life ideas can be useful for almost any person, says smoked.
Indigenous communities that defend themselves directly on wildlife, and “ecosystem services” that provide these wildlife, such as pest control and pollination, can monitor animals in a new way. Protected areas or programs against the population can measure the health of specific species. Governments can use wildlife data to inform regulations or legislation. Companies can use the data to ensure that they are responsible that manage the impacts of their activities on local environments.
One of the team traps in the Republic of Congo Caht a photo of a chimpanzee. (Courtesy of the equipment network)
But for smoked, the fact that the public can use wildlife ideas is especially important.
“We want citizen scientists, teachers and children to use this platform,” he said. “These are the future generations that will benefit from the conservation of wildlife.”
An ‘team’ effort
The platform is the next evolutionary phase of the Tropical Ecology Evaluation and Monitoring Network (equipment), an association previously directed by Conservation International that placed camera traps through tropical forests. The team will continue to generate data, says Ahumada, who will now live on the Wildlife Insights platform.
“The team used to be the largest public camera trap database,” he said. “Now it’s a small part of something much bigger.”
The objective is the same, he says, but ambitions, and opportunities are larger.
“The ultimate goal of this effort is to help stabilize and recover the worldwide populations of wildlife,” said Ahumada. “Once we have it, we can use it for conservation and on a relevant scale, not only at the scale of a protected area, but to the scale of a country or region.”
To coincide with the launch of Wildlife Insights, Google launched a brief documentary film that tells the story of a camera hunter at the Biological Resource Research Institute of Colombia Alexander von Humboldt that is using the diversity of wildlife in Cañe’s, Country’s Country’s Country’s Country’s Countral and Countral Preserve, Amazon Region. Watch the movie here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsitx5qjn7c& AMP; amp; amp; NBSP;
Google has also released a background video on how Wildlife Insights developed. Watch the video here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkgrbkckkrfy& AMP; amp; amp; NBSP;
Jorge Ahumada is a senior scientist of conservation of wildlife and executive director of Wildlife Insights at Conservation International. Bruno Vander Velde is director of Senior Communications at Conservation International.
Cover image: A jaguar (Panthera onca), photographed at the bottom of the Nougues Natural Reserve, French Guayana. (© Emmanuel Rondeau / wwf France)
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