Wildlife Insights Taxonomy
We created the Wildlife Insights Taxonomy because we needed a global standard of what we call things (wildlife, objects, humans, etc) in every project and every image from around the world. Without standardizing taxonomy through Wildlife Insights it would be impossible (or at least really hard) to manage and analyze data from within large wildlife monitoring projects and across several projects. In a global platform like Wildlife Insights standardization becomes even more important when datasets are coming from all over the world and from many, many organizations and individuals. We leverage existing standards as best we can and will provide mappings into as many standards as possible.
Find the taxonomy ID for any species using our Taxonomy Search Tool.
You can also visit our Taxonomy Github repository and download the WI_Taxonomy.R file to access the most current version of the Wildlife Insights Taxonomy. It will create an R dataframe and also write out a .csv file.
- Mammals: The WI taxonomy uses a combination of the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species and the American Society of Mammalogists Mammal Diversity Database.
- Birds: We use Birdlife International's taxonomy.
- Everything else: We also have names for other taxa (reptiles, insects, etc), domestic species, non-animals (car, motorcycle, etc), names for higher taxonomic ranks when animals can't be identified to species and have various classes to describe types of humans (park ranger, tourist, etc).
The WI taxonomy will continue to grow and evolve over time. If you can't find a species or taxonomy, you can request to add a taxonomy record.
Human identifications
Any of the following options can be used to tag images of humans. Project level preferences to delete or hide images of humans will apply to all of these tags:
- Homo sapien
- Human-camera trapper
- Human-hunter
- Human-researcher
- Human-pedestrian
- Human-maintenance crew
- Human-park ranger
- Human-resident
- Human-tourist
- Human-biker
Non-wildlife identifications
Non-wildlife IDs include objects and domestic animals.
The following categories can be used to tag objects:
- Motorcycle
- Truck
- ATV
- Dirt bike
- Vehicle
- Official Vehicle
- Setup_pickup
- Trash
- Measurement Scale
Domestic animals include:
- Domestic Sheep
- Domestic Goat
- Domestic Guineafowl
- Domestic Dog
- Domestic Elk
- Domestic Horse
- Domestic animal
- Domestic Bison
- Domestic Donkey
- Domestic Cat
- Domestic Yak
- Domestic Cattle
- Dog-on-leash
- Domestic Mule
- Domestic Turkey
- Domestic Pig
- Domestic Water Buffalo
- Domestic Chicken
- Domestic Duck
Other non-wildlife identifications include:
- Timelapse
- Misfire
- Fire
- Snow
- No CV Result (this indicates when the computer vision model was not confident enough to return an identification)
Sensitive Species
Wildlife Insights is committed to sharing data for conservation purposes. However, certain species may be at-risk with the exposure of specific geographic location data. Wildlife Insights will restrict public access to exact locations of sensitive species in order to protect these species.
How does Wildlife Insights define sensitive species? The list of sensitive species is defined and managed by Wildlife Insights based on best practices and expert consultations. The Wildlife Insights sensitive species list includes:
- All terrestrial vertebrates (mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds) with IUCN RedList categories CR, EN, and VU.
How does Wildlife Insights protect sensitive species locations? Wildlife Insights will fuzz the exact coordinates of all deployments set at a location where a sensitive species is captured. The fuzzed coordinates will be provided in lieu of the exact coordinates in all public downloads.
If you are downloading public data, you can determine which deployments have fuzzed coordinates by referring to the column titled Fuzzed in the deployments.csv file provided in your download package. If the value is True, the deployment's coordinates have been fuzzed. If the value is False, the coordinates provided are the exact coordinates provided to Wildlife Insights.
Troubleshooting Taxonomy
- How do I identify a domestic species? You can identify species by the common domestic name and Wildlife Insights will store the identification using both the scientific and common name. For example, if you want to tag an animal as "Canis lupus familiaris" or "Domestic Dog", you can search for and select "Domestic Dog" and we will store the scientific name "Canis lupus familiaris" in our database.
- What do I do if a species name changed since it was first identified? In some cases, scientific names change over time. For example, the scientific name Genetta tigrina now only refers to species in Southern Africa instead of all of Eastern Africa more broadly. If a data provider with data from Eastern Africa used the tag Genetta tigrina in the past, but now would like to tag those images using the new scientific name Genetta maculata, they could use the species filter to search for Genetta tigrina, then select all of the relevant images by clicking on the circle that appears on the top left hand corner of an image in thumbnail view. To change the identification of all the selected images, they would use the green bar at the bottom of the page to select Genetta maculata.
- How do I identify a sub-species? Wildlife Insights taxonomy does not include sub-species. You can record sub-species information in the Remarks field for any identification.
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