California Small Animals

Overview

The dataset contains 2,278,071 images, collected by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife following a standardized protocol. These data were collected to better understand the potential impacts of land use and climate-related changes on wildlife populations in California. The images were collected from downward-facing, short-focus (factory modified to 40 cm) Reconyx cameras, which were deployed in combination with a drift fence. Image labeling was conducted using the Wildlife Insights platform.

Target species include small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. In general, images were identified to the taxonomic level possible based on the image alone (species distributions within California were not considered) following these recommendations for mammals and for amphibians and reptiles. The most common categories are blank/misfire (1,320,489 images), mouse species (252,986 images), arvicolinae subfamily (124,342 images), and rodent (112,248 images).

Citation, license, and contact information

If you use this dataset, please cite:

Cannabis and Sentinel Site Projects, California Department of Fish and Wildlife

For questions about this data set, contact Lindsey Rich.

This data set is released under the CC-BY 4.0 license.

Data format

Annotations (including species tags and unique location identifiers) 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.

Images are available in the following cloud storage folders:

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

If you prefer to download individual images via http, you can. For example, the thumbnail below appears in the metadata as:

2002875_cemap-small-animals_exclude-identify/images/deployment/2238003/prod/directUpload/742e531e-cd87-4b6d-9ebf-88986ab3bcf0.JPG

This image can be downloaded directly from any of the following URLs (one for each cloud):

Having trouble downloading? Check out our FAQ.

Other useful links

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

weasel in a camera trap image

Posted by Dan Morris.