WANTED - BECOME A CITIZEN SCIENTIST
Through the WANTED – Become a Citizen Scientist project, we use cutting-edge AI to turn photographs of Africa’s large carnivores into valuable conservation data. The African Carnivore Wildbook identifies individual animals from their unique markings, enabling researchers to track populations, movements, survival, and reproduction across southern Africa.
Seen a large carnivore? Help us by submitting your photos and sightings.
You can:
Send your sightings via email to carnivores.wanted@gmail.com
Upload your pictures directly to the African Carnivore Wildbook
For each sighting, please include:
Pictures: The more, the better. If you report multiple sightings, please keep them separated
Date & Time: When the sighting occurred
Location: GPS if possible, or nearest lodge, camp, or park gate
Number of Individuals: Adults, cubs/pups, and any collared animals
Please use SwissTransfer to send large files.
Your photographs can make a real contribution to large carnivore conservation across southern Africa.
How Your Pictures Contribute to Conservation
Large carnivore populations are declining globally, making remaining strongholds like Botswana critically important. However, monitoring these wide-ranging species is challenging. Only a small number of individuals can be fitted with tracking collars, and even intensive field surveys can only cover a fraction of their range.
This is where your photographs become essential.
Each image you submit contains valuable scientific information, including:
Species identity
Number of adults and cubs/pups
Group composition and presence of collared individuals
By linking photographs from multiple sightings over time, we can follow individual animals and social groups across space and time. In some cases, this even reveals long-distance dispersal events, where individuals move across vast areas or between countries to establish new territories.
Over time, these data allow us to assess survival, reproduction, group size, dispersal, and landscape connectivity. Crucially, they also help build robust baseline estimates of large carnivore populations within the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area.
The African Carnivore Wildbook (ACW)
Because processing large numbers of photographs manually is not feasible, we rely on advanced artificial intelligence to identify individual animals efficiently and consistently.
The African Carnivore Wildbook (ACW) is an AI-powered platform developed by Tech4Conservation, in collaboration with Wild Entrust’s Botswana Predator Conservation program and the University of Zurich.
Using computer vision, the ACW identifies individual animals based on unique features such as coat patterns, scars, and other natural markings. These individuals are then matched against a continent-wide database of large carnivores, allowing information to be shared across organisations, regions, and countries.
What would take trained researchers hours of visual comparison can be achieved by the ACW in seconds, enabling large volumes of images to be processed efficiently, objectively, and at scale.
By combining repeated photographic sightings with AI-based individual identification, the ACW supports:
Tracking individuals and groups over time
Detecting long-distance and transboundary dispersal
Assessing survival and reproduction
Estimating abundance and establishing population baselines across large, open ecosystems
The ACW currently supports a growing range of large carnivore species, including African wild dogs, lions, hyenas, leopards, and cheetahs. With your photographs, you help build the foundation for evidence-based conservation across southern Africa.
Through the WANTED – Become a Citizen Scientist project, we use cutting-edge AI to turn photographs of Africa’s large carnivores into valuable conservation data. The African Carnivore Wildbook identifies individual animals from their unique markings, enabling researchers to track populations, movements, survival, and reproduction across southern Africa.
Seen a large carnivore? Help us by submitting your photos and sightings.
You can:
Send your sightings via email to carnivores.wanted@gmail.com
Upload your pictures directly to the African Carnivore Wildbook
For each sighting, please include:
Pictures: The more, the better. If you report multiple sightings, please keep them separated
Date & Time: When the sighting occurred
Location: GPS if possible, or nearest lodge, camp, or park gate
Number of Individuals: Adults, cubs/pups, and any collared animals
Please use SwissTransfer to send large files.
Your photographs can make a real contribution to large carnivore conservation across southern Africa.
How Your Pictures Contribute to Conservation
Large carnivore populations are declining globally, making remaining strongholds like Botswana critically important. However, monitoring these wide-ranging species is challenging. Only a small number of individuals can be fitted with tracking collars, and even intensive field surveys can only cover a fraction of their range.
This is where your photographs become essential.
Each image you submit contains valuable scientific information, including:
Species identity
Number of adults and cubs/pups
Group composition and presence of collared individuals
By linking photographs from multiple sightings over time, we can follow individual animals and social groups across space and time. In some cases, this even reveals long-distance dispersal events, where individuals move across vast areas or between countries to establish new territories.
Over time, these data allow us to assess survival, reproduction, group size, dispersal, and landscape connectivity. Crucially, they also help build robust baseline estimates of large carnivore populations within the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area.
The African Carnivore Wildbook (ACW)
Because processing large numbers of photographs manually is not feasible, we rely on advanced artificial intelligence to identify individual animals efficiently and consistently.
The African Carnivore Wildbook (ACW) is an AI-powered platform developed by Tech4Conservation, in collaboration with Wild Entrust’s Botswana Predator Conservation program and the University of Zurich.
Using computer vision, the ACW identifies individual animals based on unique features such as coat patterns, scars, and other natural markings. These individuals are then matched against a continent-wide database of large carnivores, allowing information to be shared across organisations, regions, and countries.
What would take trained researchers hours of visual comparison can be achieved by the ACW in seconds, enabling large volumes of images to be processed efficiently, objectively, and at scale.
By combining repeated photographic sightings with AI-based individual identification, the ACW supports:
Tracking individuals and groups over time
Detecting long-distance and transboundary dispersal
Assessing survival and reproduction
Estimating abundance and establishing population baselines across large, open ecosystems
The ACW currently supports a growing range of large carnivore species, including African wild dogs, lions, hyenas, leopards, and cheetahs. With your photographs, you help build the foundation for evidence-based conservation across southern Africa.
