Conservation X Labs Tracks Endangered Florida Mountain Lions with Meta's SAM 2 and Co-Builds the SA-FARI Camera-Trap Dataset

Conservation X Labs (CXL) has used Meta's Segment Anything Model 2 to track individual Florida mountain lions in camera-trap videos for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), and has helped build SA-FARI, an open dataset of more than 10,000 annotated camera-trap videos, according to a Meta AI blog post published in November 2025. "SAM 3 will help us improve that dramatically because, for the first time ever, we will have the ability to automate the description and monitoring of animal behavior," said CXL co-founder Dr. Alex Dehgan. The Florida mountain lion is an endangered subspecies of about 200 animals living in less than 5% of its historic range, and FWC has been tracking cases of feline leukomyelopathy, a neurological disease. Camera traps generate large amounts of video, but describing what each animal does has required manual review. CXL applied SAM 2, released in July 2024, to the FWC's camera-trap footage to produce tracklets, segmentation masks that follow each animal over time, which enable behavior detection and real-time identification of diseased animals. With Meta, Osa Conservation, Los Amigos Biological Station, the Pan African Programme and other partners, CXL then combined field monitoring with Meta's SAM 3 to build SA-FARI: more than 10,000 camera-trap videos of over 100 species, with bounding boxes and segmentation masks for every animal in every frame. Meta describes it as the largest open-source dataset of its kind and the first public set combining segmentation and tracklet annotations in camera-trap video. SAM 3, released in November 2025, can detect, segment and track objects from short text prompts such as a species name; CXL and FWC plan to use it with SA-FARI to build on the SAM 2 results. CXL was founded in 2015 by Dehgan and Dr. Paul Bunje and has run 20 innovation challenges, awarded more than $12 million, re-identified more than 299,000 animals and helped expand protected areas by nearly 400,000 acres.