Dry season waterhole monitoring

In October 2021, we conducted our annual camera trap monitoring of Ongava's waterholes. For a period of 7 days, we deployed multiple camera traps at each waterhole, and collected a whopping total of 221 143 images! After the fieldwork fun, our field technician Simeon Naholo, spent a few months classifying the pictures. This involves going through every single image and identifying each species present in the frame using our in-house software… We ended up with 115 893 valuable images that have now been uploaded into our long-term database. It is a time consuming task to go through all these images manually, and we are in the process of switching to a more time-efficient and automated way of classifying pictures with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Stay tuned for more information to follow on that front! In the meantime, here are a few highlights from the 2021 monitoring.