CitSciOz23: WildTracker and Land For Wildlife - Glen Bain

WildTracker & Land for Wildlife: Integrating Citizen Science and Private Land Conservation To Protect Tasmania's Natural Heritage
Presenter & Author: Dr Glen Bain, Tasmanian Land Conservancy
Camera-trapping - using motion sensor cameras to record wildlife - has become a popular hobby for many private landholders in Australia. This represents a massive effort in biodiversity monitoring, but the collected data frequently goes to waste. The Tasmanian Land Conservancy (TLC) has developed a digital citizen science platform called WildTracker that enables landholders to upload, tag, and share the wildlife images they capture. In doing so, participants of WildTracker learn about the species with which they share their backyard and why they’re so special, and they contribute to vital conservation research. More than 158,000 images have been tagged using WildTracker, with most uploaded in the past year. The Land for Wildlife program is a nonbinding voluntary scheme that encourages, supports, and recognizes private landowners taking a positive approach to land management on their properties. WildTracker and the Tasmanian chapter of Land for Wildlife (also managed by the TLC) combined efforts in 2021. Members of both programs can borrow from a collection of cameras should they not have access to their own and receive technical advice from ecologists through property visits, a series of workshops, and newsletters. In this presentation, we highlight key features of WildTracker and the program’s underlying theory of change. We explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid participants in species identification from camera images and, equally, the involvement of citizen scientists in further training AI models.
The early-stage implementation of WildTracker opens up opportunities to compare wildlife communities across different private land conservation mechanisms. Citizen scientists monitoring wildlife might also act as sentinels of wildlife disease (Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease) or range expansions by exotic species (fallow deer).
WildTracker and actionable management advice provided through the Land for Wildlife initiative could contribute to more wildlife-friendly private properties.