Jay Eggert Meeting – University of Missouri & Smithsonian Institute Collaboration (Roland Kays)

This morning I had a short meeting with PhD student Jay Eggert who is working in collaboration with Roland Kays and others on testing whether image recognition software can be a future tool to wildlife camera trapping programs. The collaboration aims to establish broadscale Citizen Science programs http://www.si.edu/Volunteer/CitizenScience (more to come following a meeting with Roland Kays) using camera trapping. Jay and his cohort are involved in providing the technological expertise to determine whether image recognition algorithms can be developed to extract relevant animal metrics that can inturn be used to identify animals from photos. In the IACRC and University of New England Australia, we have also been looking at this approach but these collaborators are already well down the track. I hope we can explore opportunities for some Australian connections and contributions when I return. We had an interesting discussion about their research and some of the possible barriers and complexities of using this approach.

Next stop TrailCamPro in Missouri for a few days playing with cameras and testing methods !