If each animal could be photographed and uniquely identified many times each day, the science of ecology and population biology, together with the resource management, biodiversity, and conservation decisions that depend on this science, could be dramatically improved.

compbio.cs.uic.edu/IBEIS

IBEIS is a large autonomous computational system that starts from image collections and progresses all the way to answering ecological and conservation queries, such as population sizes, species distributions and interactions, and movement patterns. The images are taken by field scientists, tourists, and incidental photographers, and are gathered from camera traps and autonomous vehicles. IBEIS can detect various species of animals in those images and identify individual animals of most striped, spotted, wrinkled or notched species. It stores the information about who the animals are, where they are and when they are there in a database and provides query tools to that data for scientists and curious people to find out what those animals are doing and why they are doing it.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Connections made in Kenya

Yesterday was a nice and special day: Clara and Marco had an engagement party. They met during the Field Computational Ecology course in 2012. Marco is a PhD student at University of Illinois and (as we have mentioned) has built the server and is the main systems person of the IBEIS project. Clara is a recent Masters graduate from the University of Nairobi and is now the IBEIS project representative in Kenya. Jackson, one of the Mpala drivers, negotiated to buy a goat, brought it to Githae (Mpala ranch house cook) who slaughtered and grilled it. There was maize, salad, pasta, cheese bread, super spice salsa, and... GOAT (nyama choma)! We had the feast at the ranch house, a beautiful relaxing afternoon. Congratulations, Clara and Marco!

And then it rained. The crew had to get back to Ol Pej and Blair did a sisyphean job of driving everybody back in the rain over clay roads that when wet instantly become trecherous ice skating ditches. 20km can take over 2 hours!

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