From The Washington Post:
In order to observe the wildlife of the Serengeti, scientists set up hundreds of motion and heat sensitive “camera traps” around an expanse of the Serengeti National Park. On Tuesday, the team revealed the fruits of their work: a searchable database that contains more than 300,000 images of wildlife, including 40 different kinds of mammals.
To get there, University of Oxford postdoc Alexandra Swanson and her team had the help of about 28,000 volunteers, who sifted through a total of 1.2 million images collected by the cameras between 2010 and 2013 to identify the wildlife they captured. A paper on their process and findings was published in Scientific Data, one of Nature’s online publications.
Read the Complete Article, View Some Images
From a Scientific Data Blog Post:
The raw data (which are being made available from the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute) consist of 1.2 million sets of images collected between February 2011 and May 2013 from 225 heat and motion triggered cameras, operating day and night, distributed over 1,135 sq. km. in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.
This staggering trove of images was classified by 28,040 registered and ~40,000 unregistered volunteers on Snapshot Serengeti (a Zooniverse project) according to the species present (if any), the number of individuals, the presence of young, and what behaviors were being displayed, such as standing, resting, moving, eating, or interacting.
Download Various of Data Sets from Project
The data is open with a CC0 License.
Read the Full Text Scientific Data Article: Snapshot Serengeti, High-Frequency Annotated Camera Trap Images of 40 Mammalian Species in An African Savanna
Direct to Snapshot Serengeti Web Site
Citizen Science: Snapshot Serengeti is a Zoouniverse Project
About Gary Price
