Years of efforts have finally paid off as the year ended with the first peer reviewed paper (of many to come) based on photographic data collected by tourists and local tour operators. Tourists’ photographs of wild animals all come with a date and a location and these collectively constitute useful data when submitted to an organized database, especially one running AI algorithms.

The African Carnivore Wildbook (ACW) is a tool that we developed in collaboration with the Canadian non-profit, Tech4Conservation, the engineers at WildME, and the University of Zurich using AI powered “computer vision” to identify individual animals of a growing portfolio of carnivore species. Why? Because a computer running the ACW can match individuals in seconds which would take hours and hours of human focus.

The tourism generated photographic data, known also as ‘citizen science’, has allowed us to identify and confirm some remarkable transboundary dispersal events over several hundred kilometres and to share this information with researchers working in neighbouring countries.

Due to the ACW’s ability to successfully match photos from datasets of independent organisations, to track individuals across political boundaries, to record noteworthy dispersal distances, and to deliver information on survival, the ACW is a promising tool to tackle some key ecological questions.

These include, for example, investigation of dispersal distance, duration, and landscape permeability; assessment of source and sink populations through inference of patterns of immigration and emigration; research into philopatry and its covariates; evaluation of dispersal directionality with implications for gene flow and dynamics of disease transmission. Furthermore, the direct involvement of tourists through their photographic material enhances and facilitates outreach and management endeavours crucial for the successful conservation of threatened and endangered large carnivore species.

Our dataset has grown significantly during the last 12 months with > 400 new African wild dog sightings and related photos shared with us by citizen scientist, for an impressive total of 1,150 sightings and > 40,000 pictures since project begin. Let’s try to crack the 2,000 sightings mark by the end of next year!