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.Comment: Presented at the Data For Good Exchange 201
