Hi, my name is Jason Holmberg. I’m the Executive Director of Wild Me (wildme.org), the non-profit of software developers and machine learning experts behind the Wildbook project. Since its first lines of code, I’ve worked hard to push Wildbook forward to serve the needs of as many wildlife researchers and their related species as possible.
My journey with wildlife research started when I saw my first whale shark off Djibouti in 2002. I was inspired to modernize mark-recapture for whale sharks by using the spots as a natural patterning to digitally “tag” them, replacing spears and placard tags with photography as a long-term tracking technique. Working with colleagues, whaleshark.org was born, becoming the first online platform to support computer vision for mark-recapture. We saw the need to apply our work to manage the data for other species and develop new computer vision techniques…and thus the open source Wildbook project was born!
Feel free to reach out if you have questions about Wild Me and Wildbook, especially around our strategy for advancement and development.
Thank you!
Jason