GiraffeSpotter - encounter with multiple animals

What Wildbook are you working in?
GiraffeSpotter

Can you describe what the issue is you’re experiencing?
We have a sighting with multiple giraffes. We have multiple photos; of all the individuals standing alone on the photo and photos with multiple individuals on one photo.
How would you document this?

If you report these encounters of this sighting: In one encounter would you upload all the photos of one individual and the photos where the individual is seen together with the other individuals?
If so, would this meaning then I need to add this photo with multiple individuals on it to every encounter, where one of the individuals is seen on?

Hope this makes sense.
Thanks,
Frederike

Hello Frederike

Welcome to the Community Forum

Best practice would be to upload all your pictures under one Sighting and then have your Detector create all the Encounters automatically. Each animal/image combination should end up as a single encounter. Then when you run matching every Encounter will attempt to match to every other Encounter and you can assign ID’s.

For the photo with multiple animals in the picture, the system should create N encounters, where N is the number of animals detected in the picture.

The issues with putting multiple pictures into one encounter are many;

  1. If one of the pictures is actually incorrect you can end up with false matches to an Individual and not know it.
  2. When you run matching from one of the images in a multi-image encounter, all the other images in the multi-image encounter are not matched against.

This may not be the practice in Giraffe Book but we strongly recommend against grouping multiple images in one Encounter in our Wildbook (ACW). I have heard that some Wildbooks allow this due to the nature of their species (Whales?) and the algorithms being used in those Wildbooks.

I hope this helps.

Also, perhaps @MarkF or @jason can weigh in on this to confirm what I have told you.

Regards

Paul