This is our submission for the 2024 Code for Change Hackathon run by UF SHPE.
Our app combats the void of animal data that researchers need to keep track of populations and animal sightings. We allow users to take pictures of animals they spot in the wild on their phone and that uploads the image as well as the timestamp and Location to our Animal GO database.
Researchers can access the website Animal GO Database and qeury for certain animals to keep track of sightings and locations of those sightings. They can then use that data to continue research to combat extinction and other ailments affecting animal populations.
The images collected also serve as a wide and accessible dataset of wildlife images which are suited for ML and CV models. They can also scrape the database of Locations and Timestamps to make ML models to predict animals and their habits as well. We have used this database to train a custom YOLOv8 on 3,000+ images of an assortment of animals as well.