Secret footage reveals the daily lives of wild animals

Dubai, United Arab Emirates - If you're wondering how animals in the wild spend their daily lives, you can now access millions of photos of wildlife captured with camera traps through a new website in partnership with Google. Researchers in this field often use camera traps to closely photograph the lives of animals. These fixed cameras contain a sensor that is triggered by heat or movement, allowing researchers to monitor the animals without disturbing them.

Camera traps can be run for months, sometimes taking hundreds of thousands of images. But those valuable images and information are usually only available to researchers, according to biologist Jorge Ahumada of the nonprofit Conservation International.

So Ahumada set out to create an online platform where researchers could share their images. In December, Wildlife Insights was launched as the world's largest database of camera trap images, with more than 4.5 million images.

The project, which is supported by the World Wildlife Fund, aims to encourage collaboration between biologists and wildlife conservation organisations, and puts camera trap footage at the forefront of conservation efforts. In addition to making the images available to other researchers, the site uses artificial intelligence technology designed by Google to overcome a major problem with these types of images: Camera traps produce an astronomical number of images to manually analyze, according to Ahumada, many of which are blank when the camera is responding to its surroundings and not wild animals, and manually sorting and deleting these images is a tedious task.

To combat this problem, after a person uploads footage to the Wildlife Insights database, an AI tool checks whether the photo was taken by camera traps and automatically removes all blank images. If the photo is of an animal, the tool will determine its species. Currently, the AI ​​technology can identify about 450 animal species, and Ahumada says that will increase over time, as more footage is collected from around the world.

In addition to collecting and reviewing images, the platform will provide analyzes that can reveal the characteristics of species in different researches. This information can help researchers understand whether the numbers of a species are increasing or declining.

The site could also eventually collect footage from all camera trap devices to provide real-time statistics and data on the status of animal populations around the world.