![\"Black](\"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/black_bear_cc_800w.jpg\")
<\/h3>\n<\/h3>\nToday, conservation organizations released over 4.5 million camera trap records as a part of Wildlife Insights<\/a>, a groundbreaking cloud platform that provides vital, near real-time information about the wildlife populations across the globe.<\/p>\n Camera traps are used worldwide, snapping thousands of photographs a day and providing scientists with an unequaled view into the habits and habitats of wildlife, including numerous threatened and endangered species. But all this information has a downside \u2014 it is time consuming to sort through and painstaking to process.<\/p>\n \u201cTechnology has made it very easy to collect this data, but we don\u2019t have access to it,\u201d said Jorge A. Ahumada, senior wildlife conservation scientist at Conservation International and executive director of Wildlife Insights, in an interview about the new platform. \u201cThere are camera traps everywhere and millions of camera-trap images out there. But most of those images are sitting on people\u2019s computers and databases. It\u2019s a major lost opportunity for conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n All this is about to change thanks to Wildlife Insights, which uses artificial intelligence technology developed by Google to enable researchers to identify species in a fraction of a second, dramatically speeding up the pace at which this information can be processed and analyzed and making it available to decision-makers in near real-time. It is the most diverse camera-trap database in the world and allows users to explore millions of camera-trap records, filtering data by species, country and year.<\/p>\n This \u201con-demand\u201d data and analysis can help inform a range of conservation efforts. Managers of protected areas or anti-poaching programs can gauge the health of specific species and governments can use the data to inform policies. For Ahumada, the fact that the public can use Wildlife Insights is also important: \u201cWe want citizen scientists, teachers and children to use this platform,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are the future generations who will benefit from wildlife conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n The platform is operated in partnership by Conservation International, Smithsonian\u2019s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, Wildlife Conservation Society, The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, World Wide Fund for Nature, the Zoological Society of London, Map of Life and Google.<\/p>\n \u201cThe earth is rapidly changing, and we need new ways to determine which animal species are adapting to change and which species may need help,\u201d said D. Reid Wilson, Chief Deputy Secretary, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. \u201cCamera traps are effective tools in generating huge amounts of data, allowing scientists to collaborate with citizens to monitor animal species at increasingly larger scales. Until now, this work has been limited by the technology needed to process the millions of animal photos produced by big surveys. Wildlife Insights changes all of that by enabling efficient processing of this flood of data. Together, WI\u2019s advanced analytics and amazing pictures will help us illuminate the natural world and inspire its conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n To coincide with the launch of Wildlife Insights, Google released a short documentary film<\/a> that tells the story of a camera trapper at Colombia\u2019s Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute who is using Wildlife Insights to document and preserve the biological diversity in Ca\u00f1o Cristales, the country\u2019s remote upper Amazon region. Google has also released a background video<\/a> on how Wildlife Insights was developed.<\/p>\n The collection of camera trap data is expected to grow as selected organizations and researchers start uploading data early next year.<\/p>\n Organizations supporting Wildlife Insights include the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Lyda Hill Philanthropies and Google.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48063,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/48045"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/48045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}