WASHINGTON, Nov. 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Conservation X Labs (CXL), in collaboration with Meta, has released the world’s largest open dataset of annotated camera trap wildlife videos: over 10,000 expertly annotated clips, spanning almost 100 species across multiple continents. The dataset, named SA-FARI, is available at https://www.conservationxlabs.com/sa-fari.
SA-FARI fills a critical gap in ecological monitoring and AI research by making available—for the first time at scale—highly diverse camera trap wildlife videos with bounding boxes and segmentation annotations applied to each frame.
Until now, progress in AI for conservation has been slowed by the lack of robust, annotated video benchmarks. Still-image approaches miss the complex behaviors, interactions, and subtle signs of animal health that video can capture.
Powered by Meta’s Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3), an advanced computer vision model that can identify, outline, and track objects in every frame of video, the dataset provides a foundational resource for researchers and developers. Videos were contributed by Osa Conservation in Costa Rica, the Los Amigos Biological Station in Peru, and partners in Central Africa, among others.
“I’m very excited about our partnership with Conservation X Labs and the impact it could have on computer vision research for wildlife monitoring,” said Kate Saenko, AI Researcher at Meta and professor of Computer Science at Boston University. “Challenging benchmarks are very important for driving the AI field forward. We hope our new benchmark will spark new research and lead to better tools for monitoring species in wildlife camera video streams.”
SA-FARI is freely available to the global community with no restrictions, reflecting the collaborators’ commitment to open science and accelerating conservation innovation. A paper on SA-FARI is available on arXiv.
“For a decade, Conservation X Labs has helped pioneer the field of nature tech, pushing forward breakthroughs that expand both the speed and the scale of conservation,” said Dr. Alex Dehgan, CEO & Co-Founder of Conservation x Labs. “Through our partnership with Meta, we can now share two transformative tools—a powerful foundation model and an expertly annotated dataset—to reimagine how we monitor animals and understand the behaviors that define their adaptation to a changing world. We believe deeply in the promise of technology to inspire hope, spark innovation, and help protect the planet we all depend on.”
Media Contact:
Christopher Moyer
Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing
[email protected]
View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/conservation-x-labs-and-meta-launch-landmark-dataset-to-transform-ai-for-conservation-302622302.html
SOURCE Conservation X Labs
