Trail Camera Images of New Zealand Animals

Overview

This data set contains approximately 2.5 million camera trap images from various projects across New Zealand. These projects were run by various organizations and took place in a diverse range of habitats using a variety of trail camera brands/models. Most images have been labeled by project staff and then verified by volunteers.

Labels are provided for 97 categories, primarily at the species level. For example, the most common labels are mouse (49% of images), possum (6.7%), and rat (5.5%). No empty images are provided, but some can be made available upon request. A full list of species and associated image counts is available here.

License and contact information

For questions about this data set, contact Joris Tinnemans.

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

Data format

Annotations (including species tags and unique location identifiers) are provided in COCO Camera Traps format.

Species information is also present in folder names (e.g. “AIV/yellow_eyed_penguin”), and location identifiers are also available in the EXIF “ImageDescription” tag for each image.

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/nz-trailcams (GCP)
  • s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/agentmorris/lila-wildlife/nz-trailcams (AWS)
  • https://lilawildlife.blob.core.windows.net/lila-wildlife/nz-trailcams (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 images via http, you can. For example, the thumbnail below appears in the metadata as:

AIV/yellow_eyed_penguin/7E7FAB4D-C1DB-4445-8CB0-4412AFE2C71D_000005.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

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.