Wilde Backyard
Encouraging community science
Community Program
We are building a community backyard program that partners with residential communities to collect wildlife images on private properties. If you think you have wildlife moving through your property or have seen it, we want to work with you!
- Focus Species: Lynx rufus (Bobcat) , Puma concolor (Mountain Lion)
- Location: Everywhere
- Project Status: Future
- Project Start: 2024
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Objectives
Felidae has been studying the wild cats of the Bay Area for over 15 years. During this time, we’ve collected, stored and catalogued more than 6 million images of terrestrial mammals. With 158 cameras currently in the field, thousands of images are collected each week in the wildlands of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Wilde Backyard program will increase the volume of our data collection by expanding to residential properties, which also builds stewardship and community engagement.
Neighborhood residents will place trail cameras supplied by the project to collect images of wildlife, and will be directed to upload their images to a cloud database (in some case automatically by cell). This will generate new coverage of wildlife presence across the complete Bay Area landscape, by adding a layer of residential data to the data collected on municipal, state and federal lands.
Wilde Backyard will allow residents, recreators and visitors to record wildlife sightings using their mobile devices. Collected data will be made available to researchers across conservation disciplines. This mobile app will collect wildlife images within urban edge communities, and process them using AI, to generate a rich dataset of urban wildlife. Wilde Backyard will provide an enriching opportunity for urban edge residents and trail users (bikers, runners, hikers) to assist in regional data collection for Felidae’s research, as well as our collaborative research and conservation projects.