Overview
This data set contains 104,782 images collected from a 50-camera-trap array deployed from January to July 2020 within the private natural reserves El Rey Zamuro (31 km2) and Las Unamas (40 km2), located in the Meta department in the Orinoquía region in central Colombia. We deployed cameras using a stratified random sampling design across forest core area strata. Cameras were spaced 1 km apart from one another, located facing wildlife trails, and deployed with no bait. Images were stored and reviewed by experts using the Wildlife Insights platform.
This data set contains 51 classes, predominantly mammals such as the collared peccary, black agouti, spotted paca, white-lipped peccary, lowland tapir, and giant anteater. Approximately 20% of images are empty.
The main purpose of the study is to understand how humans, wildlife, and domestic animals interact in multi-functional landscapes (e.g., agricultural livestock areas with native forest remnants). However, this data set was also used to review model performance of AI-powered platforms – Wildlife Insights (WI), MegaDetector (MD), and Machine Learning for Wildlife Image Classification (MLWIC2). We provide a demonstration of the use of WI, MD, and MLWIC2 and R code for evaluating model performance of these platforms in the accompanying GitHub repository:
The metadata contains references to images containing humans, but these have been removed from the dataset.
Citation, license, and contact information
If you use these data in a publication or report, please use the following citation:
Vélez J, McShea W, Shamon H, Castiblanco‐Camacho PJ, Tabak MA, Chalmers C, Fergus P, Fieberg J. An evaluation of platforms for processing camera‐trap data using artificial intelligence. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 2023 Feb;14(2):459-77.
For questions about this data set, contact Juliana Velez Gomez.
This data set is released under the Community Data License Agreement (permissive variant).
Data format
Annotations are provided in COCO Camera Traps format.
For information about mapping this dataset’s categories to a common taxonomy, see this page.
Downloading the data
Metadata is available here (2.4MB).
