Conservation X Labs Deploys Meta SAM 3 for Endangered Wildlife Monitoring

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Conservation X Labs Deploys Meta SAM 3 for Endangered Wildlife Monitoring

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Conservation X Labs (CXL), founded in 2015 by Dr. Alex Dehgan and Dr. Paul Bunje, operates on the premise that open innovation, diverse collaboration, and technology must work in tandem to keep pace with planetary biodiversity loss. CXL facilitates innovation challenges and prizes, leads field programs worldwide, and develops AI tools with conservationists to scale their impact. Since its inception, CXL has hosted 20 innovation challenges, provided over $12 million in funding to breakthrough solutions, re-identified more than 299,000 animals, and expanded protected areas by nearly 400,000 acres. Meta newest Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) introduces the ability to detect, segment, and track objects in video using short text phrases, such as animal species names like green iguana or Bezoar goat. CXL and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are using SAM 3 to bolster on-the-ground conservation expertise. CXL, Meta, Osa Conservation, and other collaborators built SA-FARI, an open dataset of over 10,000 camera trap videos of more than 100 species, meticulously annotated with bounding boxes and segmentation masks. SAM 3 can detect, segment, and track individual animals in camera trap videos, essential for non-invasive large-scale ecological monitoring. These videos provide extensive spatio-temporal data on wildlife populations, distribution, behavior, and disease. SA-FARI is the largest open-source dataset of its kind and an important benchmark for object detection, counting, segmentation, species classification, and tracking in ecology, conservation, and machine learning.

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