The Southwest Region managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service encompasses the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. This region is home to a great diversity of ecosystems and wildlife, including three of the top five US states for wildlife species diversity (in order: #2 Texas, #3 Arizona, and #4 New Mexico). This is due in part to the incredible variety of habitats spanning the region, ranging from alpine forests to lowland deserts, with grasslands, riparian (riverside) forests, shrublands, and more in between.

 

Among the diversity of wildlife in the southwest are many endemic (found nowhere else in the world) species, as well as many threatened and endangered species. Therefore, wildlife managers take the management of this area very seriously, especially as climate change and human-caused land use changes threaten many sensitive southwestern habitats. 

 

Motion-triggered trail cameras, a.k.a. "camera traps," are a powerful tool for monitoring wildlife. Camera traps can be placed in remote locations and capture observations of animals that are nocturnal, secretive, or otherwise hard for people to find. They also have the benefit of being less frightening to most animals than a human observer.

 

We are working to develop an algorithm to interpret the images collected by the camera traps for us. However, these algorithms need a lot of examples of what a "coyote" or an "elk" looks like, in a variety of different contexts. Humans have to provide these examples to the computer-- we call this training data. This is where Zooniverse users like you come in: you will be looking at images taken by camera traps and labeling all the animals you can see. These labels will then be given to the algorithms to teach them how to find and identify animals automatically.