arXiv:2606. 10940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Camera traps have become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring, but the artificial intelligence that turns vast quantities of images into usable ecological data is often locked behind commercial platforms or trained on fauna that does not match that of the British Isles.
The study investigates whether Vision Transformer (ViT)-based animal re-identification models learn biologically meaningful concepts. Using a DINOv3 backbone fine‑tuned on Western lowland gorilla images, the authors find that sex and age emerge as linear directions in the model’s representations, generalizing to unseen individuals with high AUROC scores. They demonstrate that the sex direction is causally used by the model, that fine‑tuning relocates these concepts within the network, and that the representations reflect a graded biological axis encoded redundantly across the population.
Camera traps have become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring, but the artificial intelligence that turns vast quantities of images into usable ecological data is often locked behind commercial platforms or trained on fauna that does not match that of the British Isles. In an attempt to remove barriers and increase uptake, we release an open-source object detection model for 31 classes, 28 common UK mammal and bird species, plus utility classes for humans, calibration poles, and vehicles, drawn from a curated dataset of 48,165 labelled instances assembled from multiple sites over a decade of operational deployment through Conservation AI and its successor, Trap Tracker.
arXiv:2610.32573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera-trap species classification is dominated by large models from well-resourced organisations, which often lack the species-level distinctions regi...
arXiv:2609.09705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalizable animal Re-Identification (ReID) aims to recognize individual animals across species with diverse morphologies and ecological contexts. Un...
The paper introduces MetaWild, a multimodal animal re-identification dataset that pairs 20,890 images from six species with environmental metadata such as temperature and circadian rhythms. It also proposes the Meta-Feature Adapter (MFA), a lightweight module that integrates this metadata into vision-language models for re-identification tasks. Experiments demonstrate that adding MFA consistently improves re-identification performance over visual-only baselines.
arXiv:2610.07384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Individual animal re-identification from camera-trap imagery is an instance retrieval problem central to non-invasive wildlife monitoring: a query im...
arXiv:2609. 11916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera traps often run in the field on edge hardware with limited or no connectivity, making small, locally-deployable vision-language models (VLMs) -- not frontier-scale ones -- the practically relevant class to evaluate for species identification.
arXiv:2606.20223v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Am...
arXiv:2512.07776v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Monitoring critically endangered western lowland gorillas is currently hampered by the immense manual effort required to re-identify individuals fr...
arXiv:2610.28590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Camera-trap imagery presents substantial variation in animal appearance, illumination, background clutter, and visual degradation. Masked autoencoder...
arXiv:2603.04163v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Wildlife re-identification aims to recognise individual animals by matching query images to a database of previously identified individuals, based...