WildTracker is the Tasmanian Land Conservancy’s citizen science program that empowers private landholders to monitor wildlife on their own properties using camera traps.
Tasmania’s private land supports an enormous amount of biodiversity, including many threatened species. It is also where most pressures and threats – such as habitat loss and impacts from invasive species – tend to occur. Yet most biodiversity data comes from public reserves, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of wildlife across the broader landscape.
Landholders, as citizen scientists, are uniquely placed to help fill this gap. Their long‑term presence, local knowledge, and ongoing management decisions make them vital partners in conservation.
That’s where WildTracker comes in. At the heart of the program is the WildTracker web platform, where landholders can upload their camera‑trap photos, classify the species in them, and share these observations with others. Every photo uploaded helps build a richer, more accurate picture of Tasmania’s unique wildlife and a better understanding of how our natural environment is changing.
WildTracker offers a simple, effective way to collect wildlife data that can inform scientific research and evidence‑based conservation planning. It’s also just a fantastic tool for landholders to wrangle the many thousands of photos already being collected.
Anyone who lives in Tasmania or has a property here can participate in WildTracker – whether they’re on a working farm, have a bush block, monitoring a restoration planting, or simply want to see who’s visiting their urban backyard.
WildTracker has a limited number of camera packs available for loan to members of other TLC programs (including Land for Wildlife, Midlands Conservation Partnership members, and covenant holders). Landholders interested in purchasing their own camera trap receive a discount code, a small gesture of appreciation for contributing the photos they collect of our furry and feathered neighbours.
By joining WildTracker, landholders can:
- track biodiversity on their property over time and connect with their local wildlife
- access cutting-edge AI technology to help process camera trap images more efficiently
- learn to identify species and understand habitat use with help from WildTracker’s photo‑processing tools, workshops, newsletters, and ID guides
- strengthen land management decisions with real evidence and receive basic advice tailored to the species recorded on their property
- contribute to statewide conservation knowledge by monitoring common, threatened and invasive species
- become part of a camera-trapping community working together for Tasmania’s wildlife.
Find out more and register here.
Stickybeak
Advances in camera‑trap technology have transformed wildlife monitoring. Modern cameras are smaller, cheaper, more reliable, and able to capture huge numbers of images automatically, day and night. They’ve become an essential tool for understanding species distribution, behaviour and habitat use across large areas. But with these improvements comes a new challenge: camera traps now produce enormous volumes of photos, and manually reviewing every image can quickly become overwhelming.
To help with this workload, the Tasmanian Land Conservancy developed Stickybeak, an AI tool inspired by the ever‑curious currawong. Stickybeak takes what can be very complicated computer science and makes it easy for anyone to understand and use.
When images are uploaded to WildTracker, Stickybeak automatically reviews them.
What Stickybeak does:
- It detects whether an animal, person, or vehicle is present.
- It filters out empty frames caused by false triggers such as wind‑blown vegetation or moving shadows.
- It predicts which species are present, using an AI model developed by researchers at the University of Tasmania and tailored to Tasmanian wildlife.
Stickybeak is highly accurate for most species, often above 95% precision for most surveys, but we still need humans in the loop. WildTracker participants review Stickybeak’s suggestions, confirming or rejecting them so we can continue to improve the system. Right now, Stickybeak is trained to recognise 96 Tasmanian species or species groups, including mammals, birds and reptiles.
