Check out our new WildTrack website! We showcase our academic and research work and bring our citizen science portal, ConservationFIT, on board to streamline our mission. Other changes are new image sets to guide data collection, new showcase projects and a clearer partner presence. We’re also sharing some of the…
WildTrack’s work in Namibia, documented on location by film-makers Ray and Susan Ellis of Footpath pictures, has just been honoured with two Emmy awards! See the documentary here Footpath Pictures is honored to have won two #Emmys last night in the categories of Best Technology Story and #Cinematography. Thanks to https://t.co/D7kodAgj2W…
Celebrate with WildTrack as we earn our first GuideStar Platinum status! https://www.guidestar.org/profile/68-0681539 WildTrack supporters are now able to donate directly from the GuideStar site
By Katrina Leser, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Florida My involvement with WildTrack began a little over a year ago while interning at an elephant research and education facility in South Africa. WildTrack was beginning to investigate the possibility of creating an FIT algorithm for African elephants and I…
Pumas range over all the Americas – this species has one of the widest distributions of all those we study. A few weeks ago some innovative biologists, Alberto Slocker, Ismael Alvaro Barria Oyarzo, Elena Plana and Aintzane Cariñanos wrote to us describing the challenges they face monitoring pumas in the farthest…
WildTrack teams led by Dr Peter Law in Namibia are monitoring black rhino for the Namibian government. We’re running pilots at three different locations (confidentiality maintained for security) using FIT and matching heel patterns to individuals for quick reference. Horseback monitoring can also allow our teams to cover more ground…
Our team is in the field, at our first site, using a footprints-only protocol to estimate black rhino numbers for landowners and the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism.
Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment reports on our paper in Peer J demonstrating that FIT can be used to monitor tapir populations in the Atlantic forest of Brazil, with co-authors Drs Danielle Moreira, Cristina da Cunha, Jardel Seibert and Andressa Gatti.
From Karin Schwartz, PhD, Scientific Coordinator for Ex-Situ Partners, ConservationFIT ConservationFIT Ex-Situ Update The ConservationFIT project was initiated in the summer of 2016 by WildTrack. FIT is a footprint identification technique that uses morphometrics from footprint images to provide identification of species, individual, sex and age-class from footprints alone. Each…
We recently visited Namibia with Susan and Ray Ellis, founders of Footpath pictures. They produced a beautiful short film that relates how footprints produce biometrics to help us protect endangered species. We describe the potential of deep learning to help process these data. With the help of local San trackers…
