New publisher: wildlife.ai

GBIF New Zealand welcomes wildlife.ai as a new publisher.

wildlife.ai is a charitable trust that is using artifical intelligence to help protect our biodiversity.

Based in Taranaki, the trust is engaged in collaborative projects around Aotearoa New Zealand that focus on open source solutions to monitoring fish (Spyfish Aotearoa), wētā and other ground dwelling invertebrates (Wētā Watcher) and the individual identification of Archey’s frogs, a threatened endemic species (Pepeketua ID) .

Example image from Spyfish. Image courtesy wildlife.ai

The trust is also collaborative on overseas project (Koster Observatory) and on educational resources (Kiwi or Stoat?).

Wildlife.ai has adopted a community-driven approach to their machine learning solutions. Victor Anton, the general manager of the trust, is keen to apply an open-data approach to the observations they collect, and that make the data available via the GBIF-network seemed an obvious step.

Wildlife.ai plans on publishing their first dataset to GBIF before 2023. This dataset will be manually labelled observations captured by their unique camera traps in Taranaki. They will then progressively publish additional data sets including manually and automatically generated observations of fish, frogs, mammals and birds.

Wētā Watcher. Image courtesy wildlife.ai