Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program:
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Project


Automated Real-Time Analysis of Bald Eagle Nest Camera Imagery Using Machine Learning: with applications for investigating food resource use and nesting ecology in urbanized landscapes.

September 2022 - December 2022


Personnel

Participating Agencies

Bald eagles populations are increasing rapidly in the lower 48 United States. As habitats become saturated, eagles are expanding into novel environments and encountering human stressors. We seek to use bald eagle nest cameras to quantify and monitor forage and demography throughout the urban-rural gradient. The volume of data provided by camera monitoring requires the development of machine-learning algorithms that once trained, will eventually be able to create demographic and provisioning data in near real time. Our project seeks to build and pilot novel computer vision tools using remote camera footage.