Camera Trap Survey of Cheetahs in South Africa Makes for Sad Reading

A three-and-a-half-year camera trap survey of South Africa’s wild cheetah population has found there are far fewer of the spotted big cats than previously thought.

Three field teams managing 389 camera traps shot 5.2 million images as they sought information on South Africa’s free-roaming cheetah population.

Although the researchers used artificial intelligence to classify the images, a human still had to browse through the millions of images to check the technology’s work.

“AI is great, but it’s only great about 70% of the time,” Marna Smit, project coordinator at Ashia Cheetah Conservation, the organization that initiated and conducted the Free-Roaming Cheetah Census , tells the Daily Maverick .