Google Research· Research

Where wild things roam: Identifying wildlife with SpeciesNet

Tanya Birch, Senior Program Manager, and Dan Morris, Research Scientist, Google Research One year ago SpeciesNet, a tool that uses AI to automatically identify species in camera trap images, went open-source. Now more people than ever are using the Google-developed tool to further research and conservation efforts. Motion-triggered cameras, or “ camera traps ”, are giving everyone from homeowners to parks managers an unprecedented view of their local wildlife. While a curious backyard user might be able to identify a critter by eye, larger projects are now collecting thousands or even millions of wildlife images that could take decades to identify manually. Today, more people than ever are using AI to identify the animals in their images with SpeciesNet . This Google-developed AI model can classify nearly 2,500 animal categories in camera trap images, thanks to conservation partners who have provided 65M labelled images to train the model. Originally part of the online platform Wildlife Insights , a year ago we released SpeciesNet into the wild as an open-source …

Announced

06 Mar 2026 17:59 UTC