In 2012, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the Madagascar natives as the most endangered mammals on the planet. But a team of researchers have developed a system called LemurFaceID, which uses facial-recognition software to spot lemurs in their natural habitat. "The original inspiration for developing LemurFaceID was a desire to develop a noninvasive tool that would help us ID and track lemurs," Stacey Tecot, University of Arizona assistant professor and senior researcher of the project, told Digital Trends. To minimize invasiveness, Tecot and her colleague, George Washington University's Rachel Jacobs, decided not to capture or tag their subjects, but soon found that such a hands-off approach made collecting sufficient datasets difficult. "I'd explored using dye via a gentle water gun, but didn't get very far with that," Tecot said.

February 18, 2017 --Observing lemurs in the jungles of Madagascar is no easy task. "We find the group," explains Stacey Tecot, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona's School of Anthropology, "and then we watch them for a little bit, we get our bearings ... and then we start to collect our data." Doing so is an all-day process of recording each individual, more or less continuously. But lemurs typically live in "troops" of up to 15 individuals. To get solid data, Dr. Tecot tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview, "you really have to know that who you're watching is who you think you're watching."