An introduction and a challenge

Hi everyone! My name is Blair Roberts. I am a wildlife behavioral ecologist with Princeton University's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department. I conducted my dissertation research on gazelle behavior here at Ol Pejeta Conservancy (OPC). I'm now back at OPC assisting with the field biology side of the IBEIS project.

I have several tasks while I'm here. First and foremost I am responsible for riding along with tourists on their game drives. The purpose is to document what tourists take photos of, and what they miss. This will help us to understand the sampling biases inherent in a tourist-generated data set. I've gone along with a couple groups so far and my first impression is that there are a couple different types of tourists. First-timers (those who are on their first trip to Africa, or their first visit to Ol Pejeta) are understandably taken with the sheer abundance of game and the beauty of the wildlife here. They are happy to stop at every zebra, impala and gazelle and will take hundreds of photos on a 90 minute game drive. I can relate - I see shades of myself on my first trip to Kenya in 2008. The other type are the veterans, those who have travelled Africa and Kenya extensively, or who have returned to Ol Pejeta for their second or third visit. These veterans are more particular about their photo opportunities. Predators and other rare species are their targets, although a zebra or antelope may serve as a subject if the scenery is particularly beautiful, the light particularly golden, or if the animal is engaged in a behavior or interaction they have never seen before. These are just my first impressions, but so far I think they will be borne out in the data.

A lioness spotted on one of the tourist ride-alongs. It may be possible to use the spotting on lions' legs and bellies to individually identify lions

 My second task is to set and maintain a series of eight camera traps. These devices are triggered by the motion and heat of passing wildlife. The traps will give us a catch-all sampling method for comparison to the tourist-based photo sampling. They will also generate a different type of photo that can be used to test and refine the IBEIS identification software.

Captured while setting up a camera trap on Pelican Dam.

Elephants trigger a camera trap by the Ewaso River.

Finally, I bring a biological viewpoint to the table. It's important that the computer science team understand what sorts of things biologists hope to get out of IBEIS - what questions they are likely to ask, what data and animal characteristics they care about. Yesterday Chuck asked me to come up with a question to challenge IBEIS and its programmers, so here is my challenge:

For a given female animal (let's say a giraffe), I would like to know the identities of all of her offspring, along with their date of birth (or more realistically, the date they were first sighted). This will tell me how many offspring this giraffe has produced, as well as the age of her offspring. For each of these offspring giraffe, I also want the date of their last sighting as a subadult with their mother (which will tell me when they dispersed from their natal group), as well as their last sighting overall. If this last overall sighting is more than a year ago, I would like to know the frequency of sightings prior to that. If an animal has not been sighted in more than a year, it could be that they are deceased or have otherwise left the study population. If I know the frequency of sightings prior to the final sighting, I will be able to tell if a year gap in sighting is abnormal or not. If a year gap is abnormal, and many times longer than the usual gap, I might reasonably conclude that that animal is no longer present in my study population.

So there's my challenge. When it's met (as I'm sure it will be), I'll be ready with another!