Island Conservation Camera Traps

Overview

This data set contains approximately 123,000 camera trap images from 123 camera locations from 7 islands in 6 countries. Data were provided by Island Conservation during projects conducted to prevent the extinction of threatened species on islands.

The most common classes are rabbit, rat, petrel, iguana, cat, goat, and pig, with both rat and cat represented between multiple island sites representing significantly different ecosystems (tropical forest, dry forest, and temperate forests). Additionally, this data set represents data from locations and ecosystems that, to our knowledge, are not well represented in publicly available datasets including >1,000 images each of iguanas, petrels, and shearwaters. A complete list of classes and associated image counts is available here. Approximately 60% of the images are empty. We have also included approximately 65,000 bounding box annotations for about 50,000 images.

In general cameras were dispersed across each project site to detect the presence of invasive vertebrate species that threaten native island species. Cameras were set to capture bursts of photos for each motion detection event (between three and eight photos) with a set delay between events (10 to 30 seconds) to minimize the number of photos. Images containing humans are referred to in metadata, but are not included in the data files.

Citation, license, and contact information

For questions about this data set, contact David Will at Island Conservation.

This data set is released under the Community Data License Agreement (permissive variant).

The original data set included a “human” class label; for privacy reasons, we have removed those images from this version of the data set. Those labels are still present in the metadata. If those images are important to your work, contact us; in some cases it will be possible to release those images under an alternative license.

Data format

Annotations are provided in COCO Camera Traps format. Timestamps were not present in the original data package, and have been inferred from image pixels using an OCR approach. Let us know if you see any incorrect timestamps.

For information about mapping this dataset’s categories to a common taxonomy, see this page.

Downloading the data

Metadata is available here (5MB).

Images are available as a single zipfile:

Images are also available (unzipped) in the following cloud storage folders:

  • gs://public-datasets-lila/islandconservationcameratraps/public (GCP)
  • s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/agentmorris/lila-wildlife/islandconservationcameratraps/public (AWS)
  • https://lilawildlife.blob.core.windows.net/lila-wildlife/islandconservationcameratraps/public (Azure)

We recommend downloading images (the whole folder, or a subset of the folder) using gsutil (for GCP), aws s3 (for AWS), or AzCopy (for Azure). For more information about using gsutil, aws s3, or AzCopy, check out our guidelines for accessing images without using giant zipfiles.

Having trouble downloading? Check out our FAQ.

Other useful links

MegaDetector results for all camera trap datasets on LILA are available here.

Information about mapping camera trap datasets to a common taxonomy is available here.

Posted by Dan Morris.