Wildbook
Open-source AI platform for identifying individual wild animals by sight
About
Wildbook is an open-source data-management platform built by the nonprofit Wild Me that identifies individual animals from photographs using computer vision, including pattern-matching of whale shark spot patterns originally adapted from a NASA Hubble telescope algorithm. Researchers and citizen scientists upload sightings — whale sharks, manta rays, zebras, humpback whales, and more — and the system matches new photos against known individuals to support mark-recapture population studies. It pairs cloud-based data management with AI identification, and it has been used in peer-reviewed conservation research; accuracy depends on image quality and species coverage.
What it can do
- Computer-vision individual animal identification
- Citizen-science sighting submission and matching
- Mark-recapture population datasets per species
- Open-source platform usable by research teams
Setup
- Visit wildbook.org and pick the species-specific Wildbook (e.g., Sharkbook)
- Create a researcher or citizen-scientist account
- Upload animal photos with date and location data
- Let the computer-vision pipeline match the individual against the database
- Contribute verified sightings to the shared mark-recapture dataset
Prerequisites
Wildlife photos with usable date/location metadata; account on the relevant species Wildbook
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via Wild Me documentation and Conservation X Labs coverage of Sharkbook usage in a 2025 study today.; Open-source platform by nonprofit Wild Me; individual-animal computer-vision identification used in peer-reviewed research.; Accuracy depends on image quality and species model coverage; citizen-science data quality varies.. License: Open-source; data contributions support published conservation research..
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Verified via Wild Me documentation and Conservation X Labs coverage of Sharkbook usage in a 2025 study today.
- · Open-source platform by nonprofit Wild Me; individual-animal computer-vision identification used in peer-reviewed research.
- · Accuracy depends on image quality and species model coverage; citizen-science data quality varies.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.