Wildbook Release Notes - April 2020

Release notes for April 2020
Hey everyone! As part of our dedicated efforts to keep you all informed of the goings-on at Wild Me, we are now releasing monthly compilations of the major work that’s been completed in the past month, as well as a glimpse into what’s coming soon.

New Community!
We’ve put together a new forum, home to all kinds of functionality! We are working to build this place up, so look out for Wild Me news, release notes, and feature updates.

We’ll also be using this as a place to work through support cases and bug reports, so post all future bug reports to the forum so the wider community can see and benefit from your post, and we can see what are the highest impact issues.

New Wildbook!
We’ve added a new Wildbook, African Carnivores Wildbook, to our conservation ecosystem. This Wildbook is intended to support wild dogs, leopards, and cheetahs coming soon.

For all Wildbooks
We’ve added matching for the limited cases where the species is unknown.

Flukebook updates

  • We’ve improved our integration with Whale Alert, allowing whale spottings to be uploaded to the Flukebook Wildbook and improving user account integration between the two platforms.
  • Now you can submit aerial images of right whales, and we can properly identify which whale was photographed.
  • We’ve added southern right whale matching leveraging the Deepsense machine learning model.
  • We’ve improved the detection of multiple species of dorsal fins using a newly-trained convolutional neural network.
  • We’ve added Genus-level matching, allowing for matching especially of dorsal fins where the exact species may not be known. For example, a photo assigned Tursiops sp. will be matched against Tursiops truncatus and Tursiops aduncus dorsal fins.
  • Thanks to an open source contribution from capstone students at the University of Portland, we now have new social relationship visualization for marked individuals.

Whaleshark.org updates
Two new location options, Mayotte and Réunion Island, have been added.

We also managed to address the following bugs:

  • WB-287: Allow an encounter to be removed before deletion or exception occurs.
  • WB-266: Ensure that all marked individuals are able to be exported.
  • WB-271: Fixed an exception caused when encounters can’t be serialized.
  • WB-268: MantaMatcher reflects the most recent changes to Manta taxonomy.
  • WB-325: When a user fails the security check to export a query, close the database connection before exiting the function.
  • WB-32: A user can still receive password reset emails while having notification emails disabled.

Is your issue not on this list? Check the Bug Reports forum to see if we have your issue in the backlog, and if not, drop us a line!

Coming soon
While this work isn’t available in the wild, here’s some things we’ve been spending some time on:

  • An orientation network to help our machines get pictures in the right direction.
  • Site and branding redesign with a restructured front end to modernize and simplify the platform. Want to provide feedback on the existing site and help influence what’s to come? Participate in this survey about the Wildbook interface.