A little more than a year ago, Conservation International (CI) was wrestling with a mammoth big data problem.

The nonprofit environmental organization’s mission is to protect nature and its biodiversity, but monitoring and analyzing the health of species — particularly in the tropical forests that half of all plants and animals on earth call home — was a manual and labor-intensive process.

At 16 sites across four continents, CI had established a network of 1,000 camera traps — cameras equipped with motion sensors that trigger when animals pass through their field of view. Set up over 2,000 square kilometers at each site, the camera captures images of passing fauna in an effort to synthesize and understand the effects of climate change and land-use change on tropical terrestrial mammal and bird diversity.

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