Snapshot Karoo

Overview

This data set contains 14889 sequences of camera trap images, totaling 38074 images, from the Snapshot Karoo project, part of the Snapshot Safari network. Using the same camera trapping protocols at every site, Snapshot Safari members are collecting standardized data from many protected areas in Africa, which allows for cross-site comparisons to assess the efficacy of conservation and restoration programs. Karoo National Park, located in the arid Nama Karoo biome of South Africa, is defined by its endemic vegetation and mountain landscapes. Its unique topographical gradient has led to a surprising amount of biodiversity, with 58 mammals and more than 200 bird species recorded, as well as a multitude of reptilian species.

Labels are provided for 38 categories, primarily at the species level (for example, the most common labels are gemsbokoryx, hartebeestred, and kudu). Approximately 83.02% of images are labeled as empty. A full list of species and associated image counts is available here.

Additional data from this project is available as part of the Snapshot Safari 2024 Expansion dataset.

Citation, license, and contact information

For questions about this data set, contact Sarah Huebner at the University of Minnesota.

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 .json format, as well as .csv format. Note that annotations in the .json format are tied to images, but are only reliable at the sequence level. For example, there are rare sequences in which two of three images contain a lion, but the third is empty (lions, it turns out, walk away sometimes), but all three images would be annotated as “lion”.

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

Downloading the data

Images are available in the following cloud folders:

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

A link to a zipfile is also provided below, but – whether you want the whole data set, a specific folder, or a subset of the data (e.g. images for one species) – we recommend checking out our guidelines for accessing images without using giant zipfiles.

Data download links:

Posted by Dan Morris.