Snapshot Mountain Zebra

Overview

This data set contains 71688 sequences of camera trap images, totaling 73034 images, from the Snapshot Mountain Zebra 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. Mountain Zebra National Park is located in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in a transitional area between several distinct biomes, which means it is home to many endemic species. As the name suggests, this park contains the largest remnant population of Cape Mountain zebras, ~700 as of 2019 and increasing steadily every year.

Labels are provided for 54 categories, primarily at the species level (for example, the most common labels are zebramountain, kudu, and springbok). Approximately 91.23% of images are labeled as empty. A full list of species and associated image counts is available here.

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 Azure Blob Storage folder:

https://lilablobssc.blob.core.windows.net/snapshot-safari/MTZ/MTZ_public

…and the following Google Cloud Storage folder:

gs://public-datasets-lila/snapshot-safari/MTZ/MTZ_public

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:

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.