Our research team has been busy recently with our ongoing biodiversity monitoring in the Ghanzi District. Covering an area roughly the size of the state of Maryland, where roads are scarce and the terrain consists of rocks reminiscent of a Martian landscape and sand as thick as the most voluptuous tropical beach, conducting such surveys is no mean feat. And yet every year, in a bid to monitor wildlife populations in our areas, our teams spend three months placing camerasall over the farmlands of Ghanzi in order to count wildlife and estimate population densities for not only carnivores but the variety of other wildlife species that make up the delicate Kalahari ecosystem. 128 cameras are placed during these monitoring exercises and it is a full-time job for our research team just to check the cameras, which need new batteries and SD cards every two weeks.
Placing and checking the cameras is only half of the work though. Each three-month period of monitoring results in upwards of 1 million photographs that need to be sorted, saved and processed so that the individual animals, locations, dates and time stamps can be fed into the computer models to predict the population densities of each of the species. In the past, photos had to be processed manually; a veritable nightmare when you have, for example, a herd of cattle lying in front of a single camera resulting in hundreds of photos of a cow chewing her cud. Or a wayward piece of grass caught in the fresh Kalahari breeze which you watch hundreds of pictures of like a sped-up movie with your finger clamped on the advance arrow key on your computer. Thankfully, with technological advances, this manually processing is now a thing of the past. Through our partnership with the Wageningen University in the Netherlands we are testing their newest AI technology which analyses the photos and automatically groups them into species, calculating all the photo metadata and automatically compiling it in vast databases for analysis. This process allows quicker analysis of the data and frees up our research team for further field studies.
We look forward to seeing the results from this latest monitoring period which concluded this month. It will be interesting to look at how the wildlife numbers have fluctuated after this year’s unprecedented rains that came off the back of years of debilitating drought. We are very thankful to the cooperation of all the farmers involved who allow us regular access to their farms to place and check the cameras. Without them, we would not be able to conduct this important work, monitoring the wildlife of the Western Kalahari.
Placing and checking the cameras is only half of the work though. Each three-month period of monitoring results in upwards of 1 million photographs that need to be sorted, saved and processed so that the individual animals, locations, dates and time stamps can be fed into the computer models to predict the population densities of each of the species. In the past, photos had to be processed manually; a veritable nightmare when you have, for example, a herd of cattle lying in front of a single camera resulting in hundreds of photos of a cow chewing her cud. Or a wayward piece of grass caught in the fresh Kalahari breeze which you watch hundreds of pictures of like a sped-up movie with your finger clamped on the advance arrow key on your computer. Thankfully, with technological advances, this manually processing is now a thing of the past. Through our partnership with the Wageningen University in the Netherlands we are testing their newest AI technology which analyses the photos and automatically groups them into species, calculating all the photo metadata and automatically compiling it in vast databases for analysis. This process allows quicker analysis of the data and frees up our research team for further field studies.
We look forward to seeing the results from this latest monitoring period which concluded this month. It will be interesting to look at how the wildlife numbers have fluctuated after this year’s unprecedented rains that came off the back of years of debilitating drought. We are very thankful to the cooperation of all the farmers involved who allow us regular access to their farms to place and check the cameras. Without them, we would not be able to conduct this important work, monitoring the wildlife of the Western Kalahari.
Lucas and the other research staff check cameras almost constantly during the 3-month long sampling period. Cameras are placed in these protective boxes to keep them safe from animals.
Around one million photos will be collected from this year's biodiversity monitoring study
CCB works in conjunction with the Department of Wildlife and National Park's research division to train them in camera trapping techniques
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