Most wildlife AI focuses on the ground. This model looks up in the trees

Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence model that can detect and identify tree-dwelling species.TropiCam-AI can recognize 84 taxa, including 63 species, with the tool showing an accuracy of 95% with the majority of the taxa.AI is widely used to automate the detection of animals from camera-trap data sets that can run into millions of images.However, the existing AI models developed for this purpose focus primarily on ground-dwelling animals, with tree-dwelling species largely overlooked.

When it comes to decoding camera-trap images, artificial intelligence has become all the rage, especially for terrestrial animals, or those that dwell on the ground. But for more evasive species living high up in trees, the technology is still lacking.

A newly developed AI model aims to fill that gap.

TropiCam-AI was developed to detect and identify arboreal, or tree-dwelling, species in a part of the world where they abound: the tropical forests of the Americas. Scientists built the model to address the voids that exist in identifying arboreal mammals and birds.

“We set up TropiCam-AI with the objective of developing a tool that is specifically meant for neotropical camera-trapping surveys targeting the canopy,” Andrea Zampetti, lead author of the study and Ph.D. candidate in animal biology at the Sapienza University of Rome, told Mongabay in a video interview. Zampetti’s work was done in collaboration with the TROPECOLNET project at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.