The Richmond Park Wildlife Survey 2024-2025

The Richmond Park Wildlife Survey is now ready to start Phase 2 - identifying the species.

The wildlife survey of Richmond Park is being conducted by the Hogwatch project of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) together with volunteers from the Friends of Richmond Park (FRP), who are also funding the project, and overseen by The Royal Parks (TRP).

The aim of the project is to record an extensive and comprehensive view of wildlife activity in the park through images captured by 150 cameras, which were deployed across the park by FRP volunteers and ZSL and TRP staff between 9th and 30th April 2024.  These cameras recorded around 600,000 images in total.  That was Phase 1 of the project - Data Capture -  which is now complete.

ZSL have been busy since then pre-processing the images collected, using an AI system to exclude those which contain humans or which apparently have no wildlife present.

We now need help to classify each of the 200,000 images which contain wildlife so that we can identify as many species as possible and thus determine where in the park they were seen and when.  This is Phase 2 - Data Analysis, which we are about to begin.

If you would like to help with the project then we have provided two links: one to a comprehensive set of instructions and the other to the Zooniverse software platform.

With so many images to process (each of which will need to be classified by at least 4 different people, for accuracy)  we'll need a lot of help with Phase 2.  ZSL have therefore uploaded the images to a Citizen Science software platform called Zooniverse, where FRP members can access the images and record ("classify") which species are present in each image.

You can spend as much or as little time as you choose on the classifications and return to the Zooniverse software when it is convenient to you.

We will be very grateful to our members for any help in completing the classifications and we will of course publish the findings in due course.