Automated video analysis is critical for wildlife conservation. A foundational task in this domain is multi-animal tracking (MAT), which underpins applications such as individual re-identification and behavior recognition. However, existing datasets are limited in scale, constrained to a few species, or lack sufficient temporal and geographical diversity - leaving no suitable benchmark for training general-purpose MAT models applicable across wild animal populations. To address this, we introduce SA-FARI, the largest open-source MAT dataset for wild animals. It comprises 11,609 camera trap videos collected over approximately 10 years (2014-2024) from 741 locations across 4 continents, spanning 99 species categories. Each video is exhaustively annotated culminating in ~46 hours of densely annotated footage containing 16,224 masklet identities and 942,702 individual bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and species labels. Alongside the task-specific annotations, we publish anonymized camera trap locations for each video. Finally, we present comprehensive benchmarks on SA-FARI using state-of-the-art vision-language models for detection and tracking, including SAM 3, evaluated with both species-specific and generic animal prompts. We also compare against vision-only methods developed specifically for wildlife analysis. SA-FARI is the first large-scale dataset to combine high species diversity, multi-region coverage, and high-quality spatio-temporal annotations, offering a new foundation for advancing generalizable multianimal tracking in the wild. The dataset is available at https://www.conservationxlabs.com/sa-fari.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Roboticists in China have developed a life-sized, furry, AI-enabled antelope designed to monitor the migration patterns of its real-life counterpart. This "bionic" antelope is part of a growing arsenal of somewhat convincing-looking robots used to observe wildlife in up close and personal ways human researchers often can't. The robot was first reported on by Chinese news agency Xinhua and was reportedly co-designed by DEEP Robotics and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was built to fill a gap in current efforts to monitor the once-endangered Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii).

Feral cats exert a substantial and detrimental impact on Australian wildlife, placing them among the most dangerous invasive species worldwide. Therefore, closely monitoring these cats is essential labour in minimising their effects. In this context, the potential application of Re-Identification (re-ID) emerges to enhance monitoring activities for these animals, utilising images captured by camera traps. This project explores different CV approaches to create a re-ID model able to identify individual feral cats in the wild. The main approach consists of modifying a part-pose guided network (PPGNet) model, initially used in the re-ID of Amur tigers, to be applicable for feral cats. This adaptation, resulting in PPGNet-Cat, which incorporates specific modifications to suit the characteristics of feral cats images. Additionally, various experiments were conducted, particularly exploring contrastive learning approaches such as ArcFace loss. The main results indicate that PPGNet-Cat excels in identifying feral cats, achieving high performance with a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.86 and a rank-1 accuracy of 0.95. These outcomes establish PPGNet-Cat as a competitive model within the realm of re-ID.

The current biodiversity loss crisis makes animal monitoring a relevant field of study. In light of this, data collected through monitoring can provide essential insights, and information for decision-making aimed at preserving global biodiversity. Despite the importance of such data, there is a notable scarcity of datasets featuring videos of birds, and none of the existing datasets offer detailed annotations of bird behaviors in video format. In response to this gap, our study introduces the first fine-grained video dataset specifically designed for bird behavior detection and species classification. This dataset addresses the need for comprehensive bird video datasets and provides detailed data on bird actions, facilitating the development of deep learning models to recognize these, similar to the advancements made in human action recognition. The proposed dataset comprises 178 videos recorded in Spanish wetlands, capturing 13 different bird species performing 7 distinct behavior classes.

Camera traps have become integral tools in wildlife conservation, providing non-intrusive means to monitor and study wildlife in their natural habitats. The utilization of object detection algorithms to automate species identification from Camera Trap images is of huge importance for research and conservation purposes. However, the generalization issue, where the trained model is unable to apply its learnings to a never-before-seen dataset, is prevalent. This thesis explores the enhancements made to the YOLOv8 object detection algorithm to address the problem of generalization. The study delves into the limitations of the baseline YOLOv8 model, emphasizing its struggles with generalization in real-world environments. To overcome these limitations, enhancements are proposed, including the incorporation of a Global Attention Mechanism (GAM) module, modified multi-scale feature fusion, and Wise Intersection over Union (WIoUv3) as a bounding box regression loss function. A thorough evaluation and ablation experiments reveal the improved model's ability to suppress the background noise, focus on object properties, and exhibit robust generalization in novel environments. The proposed enhancements not only address the challenges inherent in camera trap datasets but also pave the way for broader applicability in real-world conservation scenarios, ultimately aiding in the effective management of wildlife populations and habitats.

In both 2016 and 2018, a census of the highly-endangered Grevy's zebra population was enabled by the Great Grevy's Rally (GGR), a citizen science event that produces population estimates via expert and algorithmic curation of volunteer-captured images. A complementary, scalable, and long-term Grevy's population monitoring approach involves deploying camera trap networks. However, in both scenarios, a substantial majority of zebra images are not usable for individual identification due to poor in-the-wild imaging conditions; camera trap images in particular present high rates of occlusion and high spatio-temporal similarity within image bursts. Our proposed filtering pipeline incorporates animal detection, species identification, viewpoint estimation, quality evaluation, and temporal subsampling to obtain individual crops suitable for re-ID, which are subsequently curated by the LCA decision management algorithm. Our method processed images taken during GGR-16 and GGR-18 in Meru County, Kenya, into 4,142 highly-comparable annotations, requiring only 120 contrastive human decisions to produce a population estimate within 4.6% of the ground-truth count. Our method also efficiently processed 8.9M unlabeled camera trap images from 70 cameras at the Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia County, Kenya over two years into 685 encounters of 173 individuals, requiring only 331 contrastive human decisions.

Camera traps, combined with AI, have emerged as a way to achieve automated, scalable biodiversity monitoring. However, the passive infrared (PIR) sensors that trigger camera traps are poorly suited for detecting small, fast-moving ectotherms such as insects. Insects comprise over half of all animal species and are key components of ecosystems and agriculture. The need for an appropriate and scalable insect camera trap is critical in the wake of concerning reports of declines in insect populations. This study proposes an alternative to the PIR trigger: ultra-lightweight convolutional neural networks running on low-powered hardware to detect insects in a continuous stream of captured images. We train a suite of models to distinguish insect images from backgrounds. Our design achieves zero latency between trigger and image capture. Our models are rigorously tested and achieve high accuracy ranging from 91.8% to 96.4% AUC on validation data and >87% AUC on data from distributions unseen during training. The high specificity of our models ensures minimal saving of false positive images, maximising deployment storage efficiency. High recall scores indicate a minimal false negative rate, maximising insect detection. Further analysis with saliency maps shows the learned representation of our models to be robust, with low reliance on spurious background features. Our system is also shown to operate deployed on off-the-shelf, low-powered microcontroller units, consuming a maximum power draw of less than 300mW. This enables longer deployment times using cheap and readily available battery components. Overall we offer a step change in the cost, efficiency and scope of insect monitoring. Solving the challenging trigger problem, we demonstrate a system which can be deployed for far longer than existing designs and budgets power and bandwidth effectively, moving towards a generic insect camera trap.

Wildlife monitoring via camera traps has become an essential tool in ecology, but the deployment of machine learning models for on-device animal classification faces significant challenges due to domain shifts and resource constraints. This paper introduces WildFit, a novel approach that reconciles the conflicting goals of achieving high domain generalization performance and ensuring efficient inference for camera trap applications. WildFit leverages continuous background-aware model fine-tuning to deploy ML models tailored to the current location and time window, allowing it to maintain robust classification accuracy in the new environment without requiring significant computational resources. This is achieved by background-aware data synthesis, which generates training images representing the new domain by blending background images with animal images from the source domain. We further enhance fine-tuning effectiveness through background drift detection and class distribution drift detection, which optimize the quality of synthesized data and improve generalization performance. Our extensive evaluation across multiple camera trap datasets demonstrates that WildFit achieves significant improvements in classification accuracy and computational efficiency compared to traditional approaches.

The rapid decline in global biodiversity demands innovative conservation strategies. This paper examines the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in wildlife conservation, focusing on the Conservation AI platform. Leveraging machine learning and computer vision, Conservation AI detects and classifies animals, humans, and poaching-related objects using visual spectrum and thermal infrared cameras. The platform processes this data with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer architectures to monitor species, including those which are critically endangered. Real-time detection provides the immediate responses required for time-critical situations (e.g. poaching), while non-real-time analysis supports long-term wildlife monitoring and habitat health assessment. Case studies from Europe, North America, Africa, and Southeast Asia highlight the platform's success in species identification, biodiversity monitoring, and poaching prevention. The paper also discusses challenges related to data quality, model accuracy, and logistical constraints, while outlining future directions involving technological advancements, expansion into new geographical regions, and deeper collaboration with local communities and policymakers. Conservation AI represents a significant step forward in addressing the urgent challenges of wildlife conservation, offering a scalable and adaptable solution that can be implemented globally.

Insects represent half of all global biodiversity, yet many of the world's insects are disappearing, with severe implications for ecosystems and agriculture. Despite this crisis, data on insect diversity and abundance remain woefully inadequate, due to the scarcity of human experts and the lack of scalable tools for monitoring. Ecologists have started to adopt camera traps to record and study insects, and have proposed computer vision algorithms as an answer for scalable data processing. However, insect monitoring in the wild poses unique challenges that have not yet been addressed within computer vision, including the combination of long-tailed data, extremely similar classes, and significant distribution shifts. We provide the first large-scale machine learning benchmarks for fine-grained insect recognition, designed to match real-world tasks faced by ecologists. Our contributions include a curated dataset of images from citizen science platforms and museums, and an expert-annotated dataset drawn from automated camera traps across multiple continents, designed to test out-of-distribution generalization under field conditions. We train and evaluate a variety of baseline algorithms and introduce a combination of data augmentation techniques that enhance generalization across geographies and hardware setups. Code and datasets are made publicly available.