Supporting community biodiversity monitoring in Palawan

Background

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is working with a local community in Taytay, Palawan, Philippines, to develop community-led camera trapping methods for endemic species using local ecological knowledge to target camera placement.

The challenge

With an international team based across the Philippines and the UK, working out how they could concurrently process and tag 500,000+ camera trap images was a real challenge. The ZSL team really struggled to find a platform that could facilitate joint working, easy management and tagging of their data.

A solution for engaging the community 

Highlighting tools that were most useful for the team, lead researcher Lucy Archer reported "Wildlife Insights has been a huge help to our project. It has allowed our team to simultaneously work on tagging images, even though we were working from different countries. We've also been able to have volunteers help out due to the different user permissions that allow project managers to specify levels/types of access. The blank image filtering, alongside being able to tag images in bursts, has also really helped to speed up the tagging process. Further, being able to automatically remove images of people has also been a useful and needed feature for the project - this is really important to us as we are working within community and privately owned areas, so we need to ensure we are upholding ethical standards and keeping our commitment to local people who live in these areas".

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