Does anyone here work on Wildbook or know more about it? Here’s how the effort is described at the link: “Wildbook blends structured wildlife research with artificial intelligence, citizen science, and computer vision to speed population analysis and develop new insights to help fight extinction.”
Some of that overlaps with iNaturalist, but Wildbook’s added value to our community seems to be the potential around AI to detect and track “individual animals in a wildlife population using natural markings.” iNat and Wildbook share some of the same funding sources I think, and contribute to the some of the same repositories like GBIF. Any collaboration happening yet between iNat and Wildbook?
Thanks for sharing, this sounds like an amazing project and the idea of combining the iNat image base with image classification algorithms developed by Microsoft or by the researchers involved in Wildbook sounds like an absolute no-brainer to me.
You’re welcome, glad you and others found it interesting. To clarify, I’m content (and frequently awed) by iNat’s in-house image classification system in terms of taxonomic suggestions – I don’t have any reason to envy what Microsoft et al can do. It does seem like for the species where researchers are advertised as using Wildbook…
… it seems like generally a good thing for Wildbook to either harvest images directly from iNaturalist or via GBIF to identify and track individuals. What I would personally like to see in response is feedback/engagement by Wildbook on my observations. Like, “hey, that’s individual #547b, last seen a year ago and 10 km away” or “that’s a new individual we didn’t have in our records, thanks!” Relatedly, I’m a sucker for learning the individual back-story of birds that I observe and report banding data for, and used to work for an African wild dog project that manually tracked hundreds of individuals via photos, so this kind of effort is of particular interest to me.
I would also generally like to see more cross-initiative/cross-platform collaboration where data is harvested from iNat and I’m not asked to submit my observation in multiple places.
I’m interested to hear from others on this and where the boundary is for machine-generated content/updates like this. i.e. it wouldn’t be a person giving you that information but would come automatically via an integration. Do you see any downsides to this kind of interaction?
I’ve personally intersected with a few different members of the WildMe team over the years but there hasn’t been a serious conversation about integration. I’m long overdue to check in with them on if/how they’re using iNat data (I’d be surprised if they aren’t) and explore what kind of collaboration might be mutually beneficial.
Is very close collaboration between Wildbook and iNaturalist now happening and what are the plans for even greater collaboration in 2022 ?
Is Wildbook now providing instant feedback to iNaturalists as to how their observations are being incorporated and made use of ?
Surely the developers of Wildbook and iNaturalist should be working very closely together for the benefit of both platforms and all observers who love both of these great platforms. Of course it takes two to tango. I wonder what plans wildbooks have for much better integration with iNat in 2022. the matter has also been discussed on their forum page but they also need to give an update. https://community.wildme.org/t/integration-with-inaturalist/428
Could iNaturalist do much more to publicise Wildbook and make it much better known ?
God forbid if there is competition between the two platforms instead of extremely close collaboration, development and mutual support.
Why has it taken me so long to learn about Wildbook despite being an iNaturalist for 4 years ?