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.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

The Drop in Safari Tourism

The safari business in Kenya is hurting from travel warnings and the resulting cancellations this summer tourist season triggered by the publicity over the attack at the coast.  To paraphrase what Jason P pointed out, this is like canceling a trip to the rural midwest US following a (hypothetical, of course!) attack at Atlantic City, NJ.  My octogenarian mother called me before the trip to reconfirm the location of our work.  She then simply told me to stay alert and have a good trip.  Others should be as sensible.

We felt the impact of the drop in tourism when we stopped at our  favorite curio shop on the way back to Nairobi.  Unlike our earlier visit, they seemed almost desperate for our business.  We didn't have the heart to push extra hard on the prices during our negotiations.  Still we are heading home with some beautiful "stuff".
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