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.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

A sad welcome to Kenya

[Tanya] We all made it to Kenya (if not to Ol Pejeta, the IBEIS deployment sight). Eve the server, though it is stuck in customs. And we were greeted by these sad news: Kenya: Poachers Kill 4 Rhinoceroses:
Two armed gangs killed four rhinoceroses for their horns in rural Kenya this week in possibly the worst rhino poaching incident in the country in more than 25 years, the spokesman for Kenya Wildlife Service said Friday. Poaching across sub-Saharan Africa is on the rise as armed criminal gangs kill elephants for tusks and rhinos for horns, usually to be shipped to Asia for use in ornaments and medicines. The poaching on Wednesday night took place at the private Ol Jogi ranch near Nanyuki, about 120 miles north of Nairobi. Paul Muya, a spokesman for the wildlife group, said that the poachers escaped with three of the animals’ eight horns. The killings raise the number of rhinos poached in Kenya so far this year to 22, which leaves just 1,037 rhinos still roaming private wildlife conservancies and national parks, Mr. Muya said.
Ol Jogi shares a border with Mpala Research Centre, our main research base and is in the same wildlife group as Ol Pejeta. This is after Kenyan government took away one of the anti-poaching tools: Government bans drone use to fight poaching in Ol Pejeta Se we hope that part of the many uses of IBEIS will be to be keeping the many eyes on the endangered animals though images.
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